La ‘città analoga’ : per una rappresentazione metaforica dell’architettura e dei fatti urbani

A recurring question in the book 'The Architecture of the City' by Aldo Rossi is that related to the individuality of urban facts. What distinguishes a particular urban fact from a similar one or its reproduction? In other words: what is the essence of a monument and, more generally, of an architecture? And is this essence expressible and reproducible? Rossi's theory takes into account layers of reality that normally escape the eye and drawing. Among these ‘invisible’ objects are the whole city itself, the original imprint, the individual and collective memory, and above all the ‘locus’, which is the permanent link to an act of foundation. At the beginning of his book Rossi assimilates the urban facts to works of art and then refers to the origin of architecture that precedes its form, an act that is unrepeatable and endless. In 'The Origin of the Work of Art' Heidegger uses the image of an architecture - a temple of stone raised on rock - to illustrate his idea of the work of art as the unveiling of the truth of beings, which preserves the memory of a dark background and a content irreducible to a full reproduction. In 'Truth and Method', Hans-Georg Gadamer acknowledges the essential, inevitable productivity of every act of interpretation and then of each representation. After 'The Architecture of the City' Rossi continues to describe the city in his projects and drawings, in the manner of metaphor and analogy. This paper intends to match on the theme of representation the theory of architecture of Aldo Rossi and the thought on the essence of the poetic and hermeneutic act of Heidegger and Gadamer.