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RODOLFO MACHADO AND JORGE SILVETTI:
BUILDINGS FOR CITIES
Over the past twenty-five years, urban design in the United States has been strongly influenced by two schools of thought about how cities should be understood and made. Throughout the 1960s and well into the 1970s, substantial credence was placed on designing from a "set of forces to a form." The forces in question usually arose from distinctly positivist, scientific interpretations. Consequently, categories such as land use, infrastructure, and urban systems emerged, along with subordinate relational ideas like connectivity, network and web. The inherently circular integration of analysis and synthesis was immediately cast as a modus
operandi, proceeding directly from the former to the latter, and the concerns of urban design were submerged in an attempt to better understand how cities worked.

Not unexpectedly, a reaction set in during the 1970s that moved the discourse toward a preoccupation with urban-architectural formalism. Urban design then appeared to reside in the physical realm and largely in a physical context of past accomplishments. Categories such as type, morphology, fabric and fragment emerged, together with phenomenal descriptions like ritual, permanence and continuity.

The urban design work of Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti does not fit neatly among these categories. Although it is evident that their primary concerns are poetic, that is dealing with problems of making, a strong and consistent sociocultural agenda can also be seen at work. Furthermore, any suggestions that cities are prescribed or part of an inevitable cultural process, ideas inherent in the two earlier schools of thought, are constantly transgressed in their work. Instead, a respectful yet critical interest in invention and in a search for a new and more responsive urban architecture is present.

– Peter G. Rowe
from "Making Civic Circumstances from Object Speculations"

Contents

Foreword
by Jacquelin T. Robertson

Essay
by Peter G. Rowe

Note on the Project Texts
by Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti

Roosevelt Island Housing, 1975
New York, New York

The Steps of Providence, 1978
Rhode Island School of Design
Providence, Rhode Island

Pioneer Courthouse Square, 1980
Portland, Oregon

Four Public Squares, 1983
Leonforte, Sicily

Times Square Tower, 1984
New York, New York

Urban District, 1984
Este, Italy

Deep Ellum, 1985
Dallas, Texas

Pershing Square, 1986
Los Angeles, California

Municipal Cemetary, 1986
Polizzi-Generosa, Sicily

La Porta Meridonale, 1987
Administration, Recreation and Transportation Complex
Palermo, Sicily

University Center, 1987
Carnegie-Mellon University
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

Pavilion, Harbor and Recreation Facilities, 1988
National Exposition of 1991
Palermo, Sicily

Biographical Notes

Selected Bibliography

Acknowledgments, Associates and Collaborators

Translation into Italian
by Mariacristina Loi

Publication Title
Rodolfo Machado and Jorge Silvetti: Buildings for Cities

Year Published
1989, Harvard University Graduate School of Design

Editor

Peter G. Rowe, editor
Gabriel Feld, Project Assistant

Format:
111 pages, black and white and color photographs, images, essays, and drawings.

In the Frances Loeb Library:
General Collection: NA737.M33 R64x 1989
Special Collections: Rare NA737.M33 R64x