Architecture and City

Abstract

This article is a reflection on three cases in which architecture defines the configuration of public space, investigating their meanings and assumptions. Questions that do not allow definitive answers but induce some parameters to discuss the role of the architect in the public space in central areas of our cities are raised here. Our title certainly owes a lot to the famous work of Aldo Rossi (1966), The architecture of the city. However, we are concerned only with the insertion of architecture in the city, and from a very different theoretical perspective, recognizing dependence on space and time as well as on social relations that are thus established in the design of the architectural object. We analyze the Memorial da América Latina, the Barra Funda subway station, and the Praça da Sé (Sé Square). They are understood here as a
field of landscape design and as such they are problematized.