Customer Reviews

The Architecture of the City

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The practical work of Aldo Rossi is known to may, and has attracted a great number of followers for its common-sensical approach to architecture, at a time (the 60's) when Modern architecture ran out of steam and fell into a vacuous "play of forms" without sense nor content. Yet the theoretical foundation of the Rossian work remains fairly unknown, and it is distilled into 2 works: the paradigmatic "Architecture of the City", which was a serious attempt to readdress the role of architecture in the urban context [something ignored by most Modernists]; and the "Scientific Autobiography" which is a witty essay of a great architect's discovery and experience of architecture and life... This work,the "Architecture of the City", is definitely the more scholarly of the 2 books translated into English, and despite some of its contestable aspects [the romanticization of the Mietskaserne in Berlin for instance], it still presents itself as one of the key documents on urban thought in the twentieth century, along with Corbusier's "Urbanisme" and Koolhaas's "Delirious New York". Definitely recommended for students of Architecture and Urbanism...

i liked it and would recommend it to a friends family