The Artefact and the Analogue

Aldo Rossi argued that the city was a formal and political confrontation that crystallised urban dynamics – land ownership, expropriation, relations of production – in architectural form. Rossi’s theory of the city can be divided between what he called the ‘city as an artefact’ and the ‘analogical city’. The former was put forward in The Architecture of the City (1966). The latter was never fully theorised and instead put across through essays, notebook reflections and drawings.

The montage panels interrogate Rossi’s theory of the city and are simultaneously analytical and projective. They analyse Rossi’s ‘city as an artefact’ and ‘analogical city’ by means of images from Rossi’s books, re-drawing his drawings and extrapolating the categories used by him. The drawings reformulate Rossi’s theory, finding new relations between categories and images, projecting an alternative reading. The panels are ‘thinking machines’, by which the author thinks through Rossi’s theory of the city with a view to speculating about its productive potential for today.