Architecture Books – Week 8/2025
Exploring Rossi's relevance today
This newsletter for the week of February 17 looks at Analogical City, a 2024 book by Cameron McEwan on the urban theories and drawings of Italian architect Aldo Rossi — well, one drawing in particular, The Analogous City: Panel from 1976. The books from the archive at the bottom of the newsletter are also by/about Rossi. In between are the usual new releases and headlines, including a heads-up on an Archigram Kickstarter launching on Wednesday. Happy reading!
Book of the Week:
Analogical City by Cameron McEwan (Buy or download free PDF from Punctum Books / Buy from Amazon)
Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) is know for three things, though not necessarily in this order: books, sketches, and buildings. The books he wrote were few but influential, particularly L’architettura della città, published in Italian in 1966 but not translated into English, as The Architecture of the City, until 1982; and A Scientific Autobiography, published a year earlier, in 1981. Rossi’s unmistakable sketches, usually ink or watercolor, were dense compositions depicting his building designs often alongside old buildings and autobiographical elements such as his dog or even his own visage. His buildings fused the simultaneously universal and personal ideas present within his books and sketches to resemble sparse abstractions of old buildings. One can appreciate his sketches without liking his buildings, or solely appreciate his texts, or even dislike them all, but it is impossible to deny the impact he had on architecture from the 1970s into the 1990s, from his competition-winning design for the Cemetery in Modena in 1971 to his untimely death following a car accident in September 1997.
Quite a few books about Aldo Rossi have been made since his death, including the expected books compiling his buildings and/or sketches, but there are also books focused on the theories behind his output and interpretations of the same. A few of the latter, published in English, include: Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture (2019) by Dhiane Ghirardo, who translated The Architecture of the City; Aldo Rossi, Perspectives from the World: Theory, Teaching, Design & Legacy, an edited volume from 2020 examining the relevance of Rossi today; and Melancholy and Architecture: On Aldo Rossi by Diogo Seixas Lopes, who sadly died in 2016 at the age of 43, less than one year after the book came out, doubling the sense of melancholy. Into this mix of theoretical texts also falls Cameron McEwan’s Analogical City, published in early 2024 by Punctum Books. As stated in the book’s blurb, McEwan “argues for architecture’s status as a critical project […] studying a neglected aspect of [Rossi’s] thought — the analogical city — to excavate its potential.” The analogical city of the title refers to The Analogous City: Panel, a 1976 drawing that Rossi and a trio of collaborators produced for the Venice Biennale under curator Vittorio Gregotti. The drawing (above) is one of the most famous images attributed to Rossi but, as McEwan contends early in the book, is one of his most neglected ideas and is therefore ripe for study.
McEwan’s study, somewhat paralleling Rossi’s output, is made up of both text and image. The former comprises the bulk of the 278-page book, specifically four of its five chapters (“Imagination,” “Transformation,” “Multitude,” “Project”), while the latter fills the third chapter (“City”) directly in the middle of the book. Respectively, the four chapters of text trace the concepts that frame Rossi’s ideas on the analogical city, study how the same ideas are found within Rossi’s drawings and projects, argue for the theories articulating a critical project, and interpret the Analogous City collage that Rossi co-created in 1976. McEwan’s theoretical text is dense, as befitting a scholarly work, with numerous references to Paulo Virno, McKenzie Wark, and other philosophers and theoreticians this reviewer has not read. McEwan’s aim can be gleaned here and there, as in this sentence in the last chapter: “The analogical city is a lesson in imagining architecture, the city, and the world otherwise, acting differently to articulate a more egalitarian and critical architecture of the city.”
Thankfully, for someone like me who doesn’t have the patience to read every line of a book of architectural theory like I did when in architecture school, the visual essay that comprises the third chapter is analytical, far from a simple presentation of Rossi’s buildings and drawings. McEwan refers to the images in this “City” chapter as “close drawing,” in which “architectural drawing and montage are analytical and generative tools to acquire new knowledge.” McEwan literally traces images of Rossi’s buildings and drawings, extracts information from them, layers the tracings atop each other, and focuses on the main Analogous City drawing by “disarticulating” it into various parts. Shown above are analyses of Rossi’s drawings from the 1979 catalog he produced with the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (see the bottom of this newsletter); these layerings “rearticulate the analogical city in a transformed way,” in McEwan’s words.
One could interpret McEwan’s montages on their own, but many of the images are explained in the text, especially those pertaining to the all-important Analogous City. Rossi described his collage as a combination of real and imaginary elements “that are cited and brought together in order to form an alternative to reality.” For McEwan, that reality today — nearly 50 years after Rossi’s collage and almost 30 years after his death — is “the Neoliberal City where a grammar of consumption reigns out of which architecture emerges as an economic instrument.” Simply put, an alternative to the Neoliberal City is needed and, as this book explores, perhaps Rossi’s theories can point the way forward.
Books Released This Week:
(In the United States, a curated list)
Bureau—Short Stories: Disclosed Architecture, edited by Daniel Zamarbide and Galliane Zamarbide (Buy from University of Chicago Press [US distributor for Park Books] / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “A collection of images and texts that illustrates the work of Geneva- and Lisbon-based experimental architecture and design firm BUREAU.”
Franklin D. Israel: A Life in Architecture, by Todd Gannon (Buy from The Getty / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “This book examines the life and legacy of Franklin D. Israel, a central figure in the still largely unstudied history of late twentieth-century avant-garde Los Angeles architecture.”
High-Tech Heritage: (Im)permanence of Innovative Architecture, edited by Matthias Brenner, Silke Langenberg, Kirsten Angermann and Hans-Rudolf Meier (Buy from Birkhäuser / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “In 2023, an international conference at ETH Zurich in collaboration with Bauhaus-Universität Weimar explored the question of how best to deal with the structural legacy of technologically innovative architecture. This book summarizes the results and provides an overview of the current state of research.”
Women Architects at Work: Making American Modernism, by Mary Anne Hunting and Kevin D. Murphy (Buy from Princeton University Press / from Amazon / from Bookshop) — “Women Architects at Work tells the stories of the resilient and resourceful women who surmounted barriers of sexism, racism, and classism to take on crucial roles in the establishment and growth of Modernism across the United States.”
Full disclosure: As an Amazon Associate, AbeBooks Affiliate, and Bookshop.org Affiliate, I earn commissions from qualifying purchases made via any relevant links above and below.
Book News:
Distributed Art Publishers (D.A.P.), in partnership with Designers & Books and Archigram, is launching a Kickstarter on Wednesday, February 19, for an authorized facsimile of all ten issues — numbers 1 through 9-1/2 — of Archigram: The Magazine. Readers of this newsletter may know Designers & Books for the beautifully done facsimile edition of Richard Saul Wurman’s The Notebooks and Drawings of Louis I. Kahn. Similarly, if/when the Archigram Kickstarter is successful, the reprinted issues will be accompanied by a fully illustrated reader’s guide, and the whole will come in a large-format clamshell box, as shown above.
Jack Murphy, executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper, learns more about the Thom Mayne-instigated Of the Moment, a tabloid-sized broadsheet that proclaims: “Architecture doesn’t need critics right now. It’s hard enough.” Related: Last month I touched on Mayne’s Of the Moment alongside another starchitect dabbling in editorial: Bjarke Ingels helming Domus for 2025.
Almas Sadique reviews It's About Time: The Architecture of Climate Change, a book, “associated with the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam, [that] explores an understanding of architectural evolution in the context of climate change,” at STIR World.
From the Archives:
To continue the Book of the Week focus Aldo Rossi, here I briefly mention a few old books featuring the Italian architect’s drawings and buildings:
First is Aldo Rossi in America: 1976 to 1979, the catalog for two exhibitions held at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, the first in 1976 and the second in 1979, which coincided with the publication of the catalog and a show of Rossi’s drawings at Max Protetch Gallery. The slim book has essays by IAUS director Peter Eisenman and Rossi, but the bulk of it are 30 plates of Rossi’s sketches, some of them analyzed in Cameron McEwan’s Analogical City. If you look at the first spread from McEwan's book above, the drawing numbered 34 (page 153) is an analysis that pulls apart the dense assemblage of elements in the drawing numbered 30 in Aldo Rossi in America:
The other two books I’d like to mention comprise a pair, since they have the same editor (Morris Adjmi), the same publisher (Princeton Architectural Press), the same page size (9” x 12”), and were published two years apart (in 1991 and 1993). Together, they are solid presentations of Rossi’s buildings and drawings, respectively:
If Analogous City: Panel and Aldo Rossi in America sees Rossi in the throes of wanting to build, Aldo Rossi: Architecture 1981-1991 finds him with dozens of buildings and urban plans under his belt. A look at the table of contents reveals more and more projects for each year of the book’s subtitle, from two in 1981 to a baker’s dozen in 1991, one year after Rossi won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. Not all were built, but all of them are unmistakably “Rossi,” as documented in photographs, models, hardline drawings, and lots of sketches and watercolors.
If you can’t get enough of the last, Aldo Rossi: Drawings and Paintings is for you. It is chockablock with Rossi’s colorful, almost childlike paintings, organized thematically, rather than corresponding to projects, so readers can focus on “Windows” and “Domestic Landscapes” as well as “Anatomy of the Horse” and “Dogs and Some of My Other Friends” (see above). If you had to pick just one of these two titles, make it Drawings and Paintings, not only for its imagery, but for the fact the far superior paper does not yellow along the edges over time, unlike the glossy pages of my copy of Architecture 1981–1991.
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— John Hill
Thanks for the reminder to pullout my Rossi books! I love the style of his sketches. Another good one is “The Sketchbooks”.