Protibesh © BUET 9 (2004) 52-54 Book Review: The Architecture of the City – City as evaluated by Aldo Rossi Aldo Rossi Translation of ‘L’architettura della citta’, Publisher: Oppositions Book, The MIT Press, Cambridge: Massachusetts and London, UK ISBN: 0-262-18101-0 Reviewed by: Farida Nilufar Associate Professor Department of Architecture Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Dhaka-1000. E-mail: farida@arch.buet.ac.bd Introduction The ‘city’ has been the focus of many literatures in urban theories where the scholars try to understand the ‘city’ and try to determine how to design it. Aldo Rossi is an influential theorist in such discipline. This paper is concerned with the review of the theoretical argument about the ‘City’ as a definable system as developed in the phenomenal book of Aldo Rossi: ‘The Architecture of the City’ (Translation of ‘L’architettura della citta’, Published for the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, Chicago, Illinois and the Institute for Architects and Urban Studies, New York, 1931) Aldo Rossi, a practicing architect and leader of the Italian architectural movement La Tendenza, is also one of the most influential theorists writing today. Rossi is regarded as an intellectual critic on the failure of the modern movement to realise its projected utopia. In the context of modern architecture Rossi tried to find out a solution to the problem – ‘what should be the inner logic of the whole structure of a town’? ‘The Architecture of the City’ is his major work of architectural and urban theory. Here the thoughts of this author are analysed and the fundamental issues are put forwarded as he identified regarding city building through a theoretical review. It tries to make a through, exact and well argued account of the author to help the prospective readers in understanding ‘city’ as explained by Rossi. Here the paper will summarize the key ideas expressed by Rossi. It will also elaborate the discussion by emphasizing the theoretical assumptions and arguments developed in the book. Finally it will argue that Rossi’s book, in spite of a few uncertainties of thoughts, expresses on the whole process of transformation and psychological entity of the city as a place of humanism. Urban Artefact and the Theory of the City Aldo Rossi’s book appeared as a polemical critique of the state of modern movement on the city. Editors’ commented on this book as it stood as a singular and parallel record of ideas that Rossi had been developing in both drawing and other writing as such