The New Urban Scale in Italy

Abstract

The publication of Aldo Rossi's L' architettura della città in 1966 marked the conclusion of several years of research and writing on architecture and urbanism. Rossi wrote the book as a treatise for a science of urbanism in an attempt to establish the principles and terms for analyzing existing urban conditions. His thesis responded to a polemical debate within Italian architecture of the early 1960s over the future form of the city brought about, in part, by unprecedented transformations in the postwar city. In this essay, I chronicle the cultural context of the debate over urbanism in Italy that motivated Rossi to establish objective principles for a new urban theory, distinguishing between “the architecture of the city,” autonomy, and the concept of la nuova dimensione.