Oase 62: Autonomous Architecture and the Project of the City

The OASE Architectural Journal is one of the leading professional journals on architectural theory. Issue No. 62 asks whether the idea of the "European city" is still tenable at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Taking contemporary de-urbanized, suburbanized Europe as its background, OASE explores Tendenza, the movement founded by Aldo Rossi in the mid-1960s that redefined architecture based on an analysis of existing cities as architectural phenomena. The city, Rossi and Giorgio Grassi proposed, could provide formal patterns to be reworked into elements of a new design. The reception of these ideas in Holland, from the early 1970s onward, provides examples for debate on the relation between planning and the design of architectural objects, and the redefinition of the disciplines engaged in these activities. Here these issues are examined through the work of Carel Weeber, arguably the most controversial and successful architect to adopt the Italian ideas and to transform them in the Dutch context of large-scale planning and highly-specialized design disciplines.