Aldo Rossi was an influential architect, designer, teacher, and theoretician whose works emphasized historical types and memories as poetic elements in architectural design. Working primarily in Italy, his later work was designed and constructed for cities in the United States, Germany, Argentina, and Japan.
Rossi’s representations of architecture, from the scale of furniture to that of urbanism, were reminiscent of Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical paintings and the Enlightenmentera projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée. Rossi’s design sketches contain haunting irregularities of scale and typology, disciplined and refined in their final construction. Rossi’s timeless vocabulary of forms remained relatively constant throughout his career, although the scale, material, and functions shift across projects. His works synthesized pure repetition, modern space, and remembered forms into a singular vision that he named “analogous architecture,” and the frequent return to the questions of cultural meaning and signification in architectural forms permeated his writings, images, and buildings.
Rossi’s professional education at the Milan Polytechnic brought him into close contact with Marxist critical theory and the revolutionary potentials in architecture under the influence of Italian Neorealism in the arts. These sources influenced his work as a writer and editor of the journal Casabella-Continuita (1961–64). Although his early written and built work was sympathetic to the ascetic modernism of the Viennese architect Adolph Loos (1870–1933), he moved far from this position in his later career.
In 1966, Rossi published his influential book on urban theory titled L’Architettura della citta (The Architecture of the City). Identifying building typology and urban morphology as inseparable and always saturated with history, the city is conceived as a political construct. Written from a rationalist perspective indebted to the Enlightenment, the text places politicized humanist concerns over the orthodoxy of modernist functionalism and forms. Monuments and housing types are saturated with unique social and political meanings and cannot be considered purely functionalist forms. This reconceptualization of the historically structured meanings of cities operated as the foundation for his and others subsequent designs.
Rossi’s later writings and projects moved from an ascetic architecture of concrete to rich metaphoric constructions invoking memories of cities (as fragments). It was a progression from ideological concerns to questions of memory and a revival of humanist referents, an attempt to recuperate what modern urbanism had eliminated. Rossi’s works were a deeply personal examination and reconstruction of architecture’s own history. Rossi did not copy or imitate existing models but proposed reduced typological elements to allow cultural and personal meanings to be projected into them. Relying on a limited number of significant classical types and anonymous vernacular forms that are immediately familiar, Rossi’s architecture animated memories of these architectural forms to create a strong visual and spatial effect of timelessness.
Rossi’s architecture communicated simultaneously personal and archetypal concepts, much like a visual language. He frequently described this method as “analogous architecture,” which he derived from the work of psychologist Carl Jung, who described analogous thought as “sensed yet unreal, imagined yet silent…it is archaic, unexpressed, and practically inexpressible in words.” Analogous architecture draws on the dialogue between the real and representation (as in photography or theater) to communicate meaning through nonlinguistic associations, fusing past and present into experience and remembering.
Rossi examined the limits of analogous architecture at a large urban scale in his later works and specifically through drawing in the hypothetical designs for an Analogous City (1976) and an invited entry to the Roma Interrotta (1977). Given the original segment of Nolli’s map of Rome containing the Baths of Caracalla, Rossi proposed a historically self-conscious architecture that was to be “borrowed, converted, and invented,” a habitual urban strategy examined in his text Scientific Autobiography (1981). In this text, he stated, “The construction of a logic of architecture cannot omit the relationship with history.”
Rossi’s design projects originated in a Loosian search for reductive, rational, and precise architectural expression but then involved distinct Platonic shapes found in books of perspectival drawing and stereometrics. In his many designs for urban spaces, he situated autonomous and enigmatic monuments in the voids of public space to make their haunting presence and silence obvious. Their timelessness was animated only by cast shadows. The competition project (1962) for a Monument to the Resistance in Cuneo, Italy, offers a cube with a slit framing the distant battlegrounds. The built iron bridge (1962) for the Milan Triennale and the Monument de la Piazzetta Manzoni (1988–90) in Milan continue to develop this language of concrete form without any scale or material references, as if they were childhood memories. The unbuilt Piazza del Municipio (1965) in the Segrate district of Milan appears as a fusion of monument and tomb, the two aspects of architecture that Loos identified as belonging to art. These dematerialized but visually heavy forms invoke political and historical associations between modernism and Fascism as inevitable and fated.
Rossi’s first built large-scale project, the urban housing project Gallaratese (1969–73) in Milan, was a fusion of high-modernist housing typology within an attenuated form nostalgic for premodern Milanese urban housing, galleries, or barracks. As a representation and inventory of earlier precedents, they are built in the grammar of the early monuments and plazas. A relentless repetition of panel-like columns is punctuated only by two massive round columns in the center of this arcade, marking a small crevice in the form above. These support the undifferentiated flats in an extended linear schema. The circulation is arranged as corridors or elevated private streets unseen from the ground plane. Each housing unit appears identical, with identical fenestration, and the overall stark and simplified result implies that there is no individuality in a social class.
Rossi completed two schools that evoked a concern with childhood memories through his emergent vocabulary. The elementary school (1972–76) at Fagnano Olana, Italy, and a secondary school (1979) at Broni, Italy, are both organized around a dominant central courtyard containing individualized central elements as in the early plaza designs. The public space is defined spatially by a strong perimeter boundary created by the repetition of identical classrooms. This classical ordering schema appears in most later projects when the functional program contains a diversity of spaces.
The role of timeless forms and historical memories in architecture is evident in Rossi’s competition-winning design for the addition to the Cemetery of San Cataldo (1971–84 in phased construction) in Modena, Italy. Rossi fuses monument and tomb within a larger concept of the cemetery as a city of the dead, designed to evoke memories of urban conditions through its volumes and plazas. Other funerary architecture is distributed axially as diverse object-types through the center space like scaleless volumes or districts. The communal graveyard is inside and beneath a cone-shaped form, marking one end of the axis. The opposite end holds the shrine to the war dead. This monumental metaphysical object is constructed as an orange cube perforated with square openings, its insides containing unadorned metal balconies arranged like fire escapes. It is a disturbing house of the dead, roofless and windowless. Between these two object-types, more ossuaries are arranged in a riblike diminishing pattern of linear construction, forming a triangular district articulated as a labyrinth or mandatory path. The cemetery complex draws heavily on visual and historical references to history, memory, and death through Rossi’s remembered archetypal forms.
During San Cataldo’s construction, Rossi’s written and drawn works began to attract significant international recognition, defining a place for the reemergence of history in the postmodern period. Contemporaneous with San Cataldo, Rossi’s architecture began to include increasingly differentiated materiality (pattern, color, and textures) and overt references to nostalgic memories of historic precedents. Timeless historical types become specific to their unique sites and contexts. Rossi’s early interest in cinema and theater became a dominant analogy in the theoretical and urban projects that followed.
The Teatro del Mondo (Theater of the World), created for the Venice Biennale (1979), was a floating pavilion enclosing a centralized theater space. The steel frame of its octagonal wood form was welded to a functioning barge that traveled the seas of Italy, creating a transitory object that combined building, barge, and folly. Its echoes of historical theaters in the round and its toylike appearance showcased Rossi’s personal rediscovery of the Renaissance relationship between theater and architecture, first explored in his furniture-size theoretical project the Little Scientific Theater (1978). In the Carlo Felice Theater (1983–89) in Genoa, Italy, a unique historical precedent became the site of construction for “civil architecture.” Barbarino’s prior neoclassical theater facing the ducal palace was reborn as a large, 2000-seat balconied theater. A chimneylike cone, used in earlier projects, distributes light by penetrating through the internal public spaces. A stone-clad tower block rises above the theater, and the entrance to the theater acts as a filter between city and spectacle.
In 1981, Rossi submitted the winning housing scheme for the international design competition for urban renewal in the former West Berlin (IBA). Finished in 1988, the perimeter-block housing project exhibits a wide range of materials and scale. Although housing is supported by an arcade as in Gallaratese, the vertical circulation towers facing the interior courtyard, pitched spires over elevators, and gridded glass facades between masonry housing blocks materially differentiate each element of the project, creating the impression of linkages between identical small buildings. Only the oversize columns at both ends of the project recall his earlier works. Other works in Berlin included the smaller apartment building (1983) in Berlin-Tiergarten on Rauchstrasse and an unbuilt competition design (1978) for the Museum of German History.
In the 1980s, Rossi turned his methodology toward commercial institutions within urban contexts. The Commercial Center of Fontivegge (1982–89) in Perugia, Italy, is a U-shaped complex of shops and offices framing a multistory house form on exaggerated piers. The Commercial Center “Centro Torri” (1985–88) in Parma, Italy, adopts the typology of Renaissance market stalls to recuperate commerce as “the center of human life.” Ten brick towers mark the dominant central arcade that holds the stores together. The office building (1984) for Officine GFT in Turin and the unbuilt Edificio Techint (1984) in Buenos Aires, Argentina, turned back from normative modernism to three dimensional assemblages of historical elements. In 1989, the Il Palazzo Hotel and Restaurant Complex in Fukuoka, Japan, drew on Roman construction forms, presenting a blank public facade of travertine with exquisitely detailed, disengaged columns separated by iron banding at each floor level. Constructed on a raised public plaza, this project translates premodern urban gestures into a frenetic high-tech context, offering the qualities of serenity, silence, and eternity that Rossi pursued in all his works.
Rossi’s earliest passions and vocabulary remained a constant referent throughout his career, reemerging and slowly transforming into more sophisticated compositions, all with increasing sensitivity to materiality and related connections. Virtually every project can be read as an examination of the historical essence of architectural form and an interrogation of the city as a historical force. His highly personal approach placed the human condition at the conceptual and physical center of the works, and by offering unique memories of historical forms, he created an architecture that invites the projection of individual meanings on the constructed forms. His widely disseminated writings, drawings, and buildings encouraged the turn away from dehistoricized modern urbanism in Europe and elsewhere.
THOMAS MICAL |
