Two Essays on Architecture

The first essay is a critique of Giorgio Grassi's theoretical work, focusing on his texts of the late 1960s and early 1970s and primarily on Grassi's masterpiece "The Logical Construction of Architecture" (1967). A confrontation with Grassi's arguments is necessary to imagine architecture as public knowledge, as something explicitely based on and explicitely geared towards the construction of a shared intelligence. Grassi's work provides the most radical and most refined theoretical framework in order to define a positive relationship with the resources accumulated in the architecture of the past and thus to imagine a rational architecture for the future. The second essay is a detailed analysis of Aldo Rossi's 1966 masterpiece "The Architecture of the City". At first sight, the book looks terrible: messy, repetitive and inconclusive. However, over time, Rossi's text has become a classic. The book contains neither clear theory nor precise method, yet Rossi seems to descover something. Here and there a constellation of fragments emerges that seems to herald a new sense for contemüporary architecture. In his later career, Rossi did not develop this approach any further; nevertheless this fragile theoretical construction remains extremely valuable for contemporary architecture. It should not be wasted.