"... Patte's section focuses on the relationship between infrastructure (the street, the sewers, the drainage system) and houses. Both cases (el otro es Scena Tragica de Serlio) address the space of circulation as the main datum of the city, but in Patte's case, urban space us shown in relationship with the appartment interior. In Serlio's perspective, the city is still made up of clearly representative architectural forms, whereas in Patte's section the city is represented as mere infrastructure, as an anonymous machine for living.
Patte's section is not only a clear manifestation of the shift in importance from architecture to engineer, but also demonstrates the expanded role of design within the organization of the city. In this case, design is no longer manifested through "figurative" forms, but through generic protocols that address neither belief nor ideology. These protocols are the height of the rooms, the provision sewers, and the maintenance of the street as a clean and wide space. As the historian Antoine Picon has written, in Patte's section, the architecture of the city becomes a productive work: "the street became a machine regulating a set of flows: the flowing of water and the traffic of vehicles." In his Mémoires, Patte described the city as a theatre of machines, an apparatus that regulates basic human needs from birth to death (among other things, Patte proposed an efficient system for burial in which the cadaver would be "entombed" in the parish chapel and then moved from there to the cemetery by a carefully organized process of corpse disposal).
Patte's city is no longer the coherent body that all classicist theories on architecture put forward; it is simply a machine that reproduces and controls the life of its inhabitants. Life as such becomes the generic property that the city addresses with its functioning as infrastructure. From this moment onwards, architectural theory's main topics were concepts like distribution, economy, and comfort: not moral or ideological values, but possibilities for managerial control of the population. It is precisely here that we can find the rise of urbanism as an autonomous discipline, independent from architecture."
source: página 32, Introduction, The City as a Project, Pier Vittorio Aureli
