The Yamanote Line as architecture: building on the ruination of urban limits

Infrastructure has become a relatively established field of inquiry in architectural academia over the last two decades, insofar as it builds on the rational and generative overtones of the term. However, the contrasting possibility that infrastructure might represent an obstacle for the city and its architecture has often been overlooked. Simultaneously, the idea that the city might be considered as a piece of architecture that can be comprehended, controlled, and eventually designed as a whole (whether from scratch or incrementally), has recently resurfaced, echoing Aldo Rossi's concept of ‘primary elements’. In his seminal bookThe Architecture of the City, Rossi described the way these elements ‘participate in the evolution of the city over time in a permanent way, often becoming identified with the major artefacts constituting the city’. But, he noted:

[p]rimary elements are not only monuments, just as they are not only fixed activities; in a general sensethey are those elements capable of accelerating the process of urbanizationin a city, and they also characterize the processes of spatial transformation in an area larger than the city.