Contaminatio by Kim Võ

CONTAMINATIO JESSICA LIU

T H E U N IV ERSIT Y OF M EL B OUR NE M AST ER OF A RCH IT ECT U RE ST U DIO D

CONTAMINATIO

ST U DIO 8 : M A X XI ST U DIO TH E HOM E, T H E MON UM EN T, T H E MUSEUM ST U DIO L EA DERS: SC OT T WO ODS & KIM VÃ&#x2022;

CONTENTS

WAY FIN DING PL ANS

iii

PROLO G UE

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Q & A

SU PPORTING MATER IAL

WORKS

CRIT ICS R EVIEW

IN DEX

NOT ES

KNOWL ED GE BANK

EXHIBITION SUITE 1

COFFEE BAR

COFFEE BAR EXHIBITION SUITE 1

TEMPORARY EXHIBITION

AUDITORIUM

RECEPTION

AUDITORIUM

ENTRANCE HALL

SHOP

TEMPORARY EXHIBITION GRAPHIC COLLECTION

RECEPTION

ENTRANCE HALL

GROUND FLOOR WAYFINDING PL ANS

iii

EXHIBITION SUITE 2

EXHIBITION SUITE 4

EXHIBITION SUITE 3

EXHIBITION SUITE 4

GRAPHIC COLLECTION

AUDITORIUM AUDITORIUM

FIRST FLOOR iv

EXHIBITION SUITE 5

EXHIBITION SUITE 3

FIRST FLOOR WAYFINDING PL ANS

P R O L O GU E

â&#x20AC;&#x153;Ever since my first projects, where I was interested in purism, I have loved contaminations, slight changes, selfcommentaries, and repetitions.â&#x20AC;?

- Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography, 1.

vii

Q & A Interview by Manning McBride

On Rossi Do you think that you have moved out of Rossi’s shadow? How have you embraced him but also managed to move away from him? I think what my project direction has eventuated to is the embracing of Rossi, so I probably haven’t moved away from him that much. The approach I took was going back and examining my Rossi residential project and its relationship to the city and during that excavation of evidence and concepts, noted how the Gallaratese itself was part of a lineage and evolution of an initial idea that was used two or three projects prior. Rossi was able to form this lineage through the strategy of transposing the deep structure of an early project to other later ones and therefore create this relationship between past and present, between city and the architecture project. So utilising that idea within the MAXXI and by looking at the MAXXI’s grid as an organisational strategy was a way to bring in Rossi’s concept as well as his archetypal forms into the project to form this new museum. Perhaps, by using the organisational strategy of the MAXXI I have been able to move away from Rossi’s static and stable scheme and form this opportunity to discover new things and form this new language for the new museum. For me, I think I may need to look at my project in hindsight to see where I have moved away from him.

Do you think Rossi is still relevant for contemporary discourse? If yes, why? If no, why? I think yes and no. Rossi could be relevant in contemporary discourse simply because of the fact that he has been largely absent from it and that we’ve been preoccupied with other areas of architectural discussion. It could be simply looking back at his rhetoric and concepts and reframing it to our time, seeing it through a new lens and extracting relevant ideas. Rossi’s ideas of the city, collective memory and typology could be relevant to the 21st century especially as our urban landscape is increasingly proliferated with forms that are superfluous and disposable; structures that don’t allow us to form collective memory or history. Rossi may be part of an answer to this problem and it might be worth it to circle back and examine his ideas. On the other hand, I wonder if because Rossi’s ideas are so well known and are tied to a particular zeitgeist that he is no longer as relevant to contemporary discourse and that new problems require new solutions and discussion.

On Exhibition What is the challenge of exhibiting architecture? What is exhibited and what does the exhibiting in your project? Is it that simple?

How would you describe an architecture that exists solely inside the museum? How is that architecture different to architecture that exists outside the museum?

I think there are many challenges with exhibiting architecture and that it is not simple at all. There is a notion with exhibition that the elements that are on display become art objects and therefore architecture may be reduced to just that. Another challenge is also context. Once you move something away from its intended environment into the museum context, it takes on a new meaning and it also changed the relationship and perception that you would have with architecture itself. In relation to my project, the wholesale nature of Rossi and the exacerbation of certain archetypal forms is what is exhibited in the new museum and the relationship between the MAXXI and the new museum is what’s driving the exhibition of architecture. Rossi’s forms start to take on other meaning in it’s new environment and creates new conditions in which one would experience the MAXXI.

I guess I have partially answered that in the previous question. Part of the idea of architecture that exists solely inside the museum is the fact that it might be highly curated or that is designed for a very specific use and interaction I’d say. I think another thing with exhibiting architecture in the museum is perceiving it in its totality; in the sense that it would be difficult to form an image or understanding of it without the museum context influencing it. I think it very much ties in with context, perception, and relationship. Architecture that exists outside of the museum has freedom whereas architecture that exists inside the museum manifest at different scales and may imply a fragmentation of the project. However, another way you could think about it is that all is display space.

On the Project of Architecture Can you identify a moment of crisis in the development of your project or your thinking about your project – for example a particular problem that couldn’t be resolved, or the idea that took-over your project? Is it an architectural problem that will continue to haunt your project even after its completion? I think at every step there was some crisis for me. The kickstarting of the project was tricky for me in the sense that I wasn’t sure how Rossi was going to come in and also my positioning on the MAXXI Museum. The Rossi aspect for me was thinking whether or not I bring him in through form or bringing him through method and organisational strategies. I believe towards the end I did find some balance in achieving the two. Adding layers of complexity was also difficult and paradoxically the more I layered the simpler it became.

Has your project for an architecture exhibition changed your position or attitude to architecture more generally? If yes, how? I’m not sure if it has changed my attitude to architecture that much. The theoretical side of the studio itself has challenged me and has highlighted the multitude of ways one could interrogate concepts of the past to generate new ideas. The project for architectural exhibition has shown me that I am interested in other aspects of exhibition such as curation and strategy in terms of presentation. The final project of this studio evolved into an exercise that I didn’t expect and going through it has been really interesting and shown the potential of the architectural side of exhibition.

I feel like you can definitely dwell on this project and it can evolve and go on and on. For me, I had to stop myself at some point, stop reading the texts and run with it because there was simply too much out there. I found it difficult at times to insert my own hand into the project. A moment of crisis was accepting that at some point there may not be a clear reasoning or strategy to look back on when making a design decision but rather it starts to become yours and that there is an appropriate time for your own judgement and make it into your own project. It is a problem that will continue to haunt the project; and even perhaps haunt me, because you can continue to interrogate it and there is a multitude of ways you can interpret Rossi. So how you see Rossi may be very different to how the Italian or American critics will see it in the final presentation.

Q & A

S U P P O RT I N G M AT E R I A L

Aldo Rossi, Drawing of Gallaratese, from MAXXI Foundation Archive 6

Aldo Rossi, Sketch of Gallaratese, from MAXXI Foundation Archive SUPP O RT I N G M AT ER I A L

Excerpt from Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect, (Kรถnemann, 2001) 8

SUPP O RT I N G M AT ER I A L

Excerpt from Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect, (Kรถnemann, 2001) 12

SUPP O RT I N G M AT ER I A L

Excerpt from Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect, (Kรถnemann, 2001) 14

SUPP O RT I N G M AT ER I A L

Excerpt from Diane Y.F. Ghirardo, Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture, (United States: Yale University Press, 2019), 72-101. 16

SUPP O RT I N G M AT ER I A L

WORK S

OVERVIEW ISOMETRIC 0

WORK S

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.

LANDSCAPE ENTRANCE HALL RECEPTION TEMPORARY EXHIBITION GRAPHIC COLLECTION EXHIBITION SUITE 1 AUDITORIUM SHOP COFFEE BAR

GROUND FLOOR PLAN MAXXI MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO 1

EXHIBITION SUITE 1

COFFEE BAR

EXHIBITION SUITE 1

COFFEE BAR

TEMPORARY EXHIBITION

AUDITORIUM 1

RECEPTION

SHOP ENTRANCE HALL

SHOP

TEMPORARY EXHIBITION

RECEPTION GRAPHIC COLLECTION

GROUND FLOOR PLAN

ENTRANCE HALL

10m

15m

20m

25m

GROUND FLOOR PLAN 1

WORK S

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

ENTRANCE HALL EXHIBITION SUITE 2 EXHIBITION SUITE 3 EXHIBITION SUITE 4 AUDITORIUM

FIRST FLOOR PLAN MAXXI MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO 1

EXHIBITION SUITE 4

EXHIBITION SUITE 3

EXHIBITION SUITE 4

GRAPHIC COLLECTION

AUDITORIUM 2

FIRST FLOOR PLAN

10m

15m

20m

25m

FIRST FLOOR PLAN 1

WORK S

1. 2. 3.

ENTRANCE HALL EXHIBITION SUITE 3 EXHIBITION SUITE 5

SECOND FLOOR PLAN MAXXI MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO 1

EXHIBITION SUITE 5

EXHIBITION SUITE 3

SECOND FLOOR PLAN

10m

15m

20m

25m

SECOND FLOOR PLAN 1

WORK S

IMITATION 0

WORK S

EMERGENCE 0

400mm

800

1200

1600

2000

WORK S

LIBERATE 0

WORK S

THE INTERNAL STREET WORK S

THE GALLERY WORK S

THE UNDUALTING FIELD WORK S

CRITICS REV IEW By Oskar Rosa

The Sensuality of the Screen One would not typically think of Aldo Rossi as a sensuous character, when you think of his Gallaratese housing project there is nothing sensuous in its formal or tectonic nature. The Gallaratese’s hard abutments into Aymonio’s contribution read a specific kind of tectonic distance, of a rigid alignment or coupling out of necessity. There is no romance in this love, it’s a love of duty rather than of pleasures.

side of the screen. We are granted the view of Rossi’s delicate (almost) touch, yet we’re pushed away in turn as Rossi turns his back on us forcing a mediated view of their intimacy. The MAXXI is not inert within this configuration, Rossi’s screen tempts the MAXXI into playing its part. The balustrades reading as its own screen as it attempts a moment of privacy between itself and Rossi’s romance.

“Contaminatio” strips Rossi bare, reduces his figure to an essential formalisation of the Gallaratese and deploys him into the MAXXI’s entrance hall as the screen. It is here we begin to see a sensuality in Rossi’s character, a naked vulnerability delicately poised against the MAXXI interior. He moves carefully around it’s stairs, corridors and walkways. He steps aside, allowing the MAXXI to continue along its path before continuing his tracing of its curves then vanishing around a bend further into the MAXXI. Their coupling is tight, he sits as close as he can get, he craves contact yet resists as he lingers just outside a full embrace. There is no shame in their erotic dance, the user privy to the complexity of their coupling. As one moves throughout the entrance hall we are provided the luxury of time on either

It is in this method of critique, of embedding Rossi as the figure of sensuality and eroticism that “Contaminatio” begins to break away from the rigid formalisms of Rossian architecture. The screen displays as a recognisable development on the exterior motifs of the Gallaratese but in its tectonic thinness, in its predilection for swings between exhibitionism and privacy these very same formalisms bring about a totally new sensibility. Perhaps this is the context necessary for the Gallaratese to show this other side to its character. A chance for its liberation from the need for housing and function. Put into the museum it can finally perform this dance, to show its vulnerability and need for a sensuous pleasure of exploration and being near.

INDE X STEP 1 & ST E P 2 PROJ E C T S

1 .1 T H E C IT Y

Proposal for the Central Business District in Florence, 1977 Image of Site Plan from Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect, (Kรถnemann, 2001), 74. 54

Axonometric of the city I N D EX

Aldo Rossi in ‘Proposal for the central business district in Florence’ writes about considering the new business district as an extension to Florence and reflects on how the CBD is often criticised for being disconnected from the dynamics of the city. My city proposes the rectangular grid which derives from the split and folding of the Gallaratese building into an ‘L’ formation. Repetition and modulation is employed to reestablish the urban grid and the softening of the edge conditions alludes to the potential growth of the city. The overhead Colonnade that runs above establishes the connection both within the city and beyond. 56

Street view of the city I N D EX

1 .2 T H E MONUMENT

Monument to the Partisans in Segrate, 1965 Image of Plans and elevations of the monument, from Alberto Ferlenga, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect, (Kรถnemann, 2001), 39. 58

The Monument : Axonometric Projection I I N D EX

In ‘The Monument’, I examined how Rossi’s early project ideas and concepts have carried through and translated to the Gallaratese through the deconstruction and transposition of key archetypal forms and vice versa. I was particularly drawn to Rossi’s 1965 project, Monument to the Partisans in Segrate. There are geometric similarities between the monument that Rossi created early in his career and the Gallaratese such as the stairs, the columns and lastly the walls that become pilasters through the employment of a mass above. Just like the monument in Segrate, Gallaratese is a scheme that is an assemblage of parts. The linear composition of the my monument reflects that of the austere form of the Gallaratese. There is one central axis where one would ascend the stairs and arrive into the upper space. Instead of having a singular mass of two offset rectangular forms, an intentional split disconnects the two as a way to emphasises the formal geometries of the monument. The apertures frame the outlook of the viewer and serve as directional indicators. 60

The Monument : Axonometric Projection II I N D EX

1 .3 T H E D OMEST IC OB JE CT

The Domestic Object : Axonometric Projection I I N D EX

The object that I have chose to design is a clock radio. Here I have chosen to revive this object by designing it as a freestanding piece thus creating a new typology within this electronic category. In the same vein as monument, I looked at how Rossiâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s built form ideas could be carried through to his domestic objects through the transposition of certain forms and elements. The columns and pilaster of the Gallaratese has been extruded and emphasised in my object with the extension bringing the object height comparable to that of a bedside table. The upper forms are split into two with the upper element being the clock and the lower as the sound system. The front and the back of the object are similar in elevation recalling the composition of the Gallaratese where both long facades are similar. 64

The Domestic Object : Axonometric Projection II I N D EX

2 .1 ONE RO OM

The Model: A model for a Qualitative Society (1968) From Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Exhibit A : Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000, (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2018), 106-113 66

The City on display to be experienced. I N D EX

PLAYING WITH SCALE My interest in the project was the horizontal and vertical elements and the elevated platform. The action of jumping of the man indicates one leaving from being the learned adult to the learning child alluding to the sense of play and curiosity. Here my curatorial strategy is one of â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Playing with Scaleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; where the proposal is not a 1:1 nor is it a model but exists somewhere in between. My city project is manipulated in scale - where my urban space is miniaturised to look like large building blocks. One would be able to explore the space from above via the elevated colonnade with a god view of the sprawling city or from below moving between the miniature forms. The experience however is different between child and adult, where the child would be at relative height to the lower city forms and the space would still seem some like of a play space. The city no longer has an origin and is encouraged to be actively experienced rather than merely viewed from afar. I N D EX

2 .2 T H REE RO OMS

Superarchitettura (1966) From Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Exhibit A : Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000, (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2018) 70

The Upper Form inserted within The Stairs I N D EX

RECONTEXTUALISE In my second exhibition, I looked at the image from the 1966 Superarchitettura Exhibition in which strange forms flank either side of this room and appear at odds with the environment in which it was placed in. The juxtaposition of the large colourful piece and the small room forces one to reexamine the meaning of this object. In the case here, the two people have subjectively given the meaning of seating to the forms. My curatorial strategy for my three rooms is ‘Recontextualisation’. Here I have used my monument project not only as the exhibition spaces but as pieces on exhibit as well. The spaces are comprised of the Upper Form, The Stairs and The Colonnade. Through the cutting and removal of one element from a space and the superimposition of it into another, one is provoked to question the meaning of the removed objects in its new context and furthermore reflect on how the insertion has affected the space. The Guidelines: • Lift entire room • Insert into another room • If the elements exceeds ‘room’ that has a hard wall, excess pieces get removed • If the elements exceeds ‘room’ but ‘room’ does not have a ceiling/overhead element, then it can exceed 72

The Colonnade inserted into the Upper Form I N D EX

The Stairs inserted within The Colonnade I N D EX

2 .3 F I VE RO OMS

Archaeology of the City (1977) From Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen, Exhibit A : Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000, (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2018), 195. 76

I N D EX

FORMULATION OF 1:1 In my third exhibition, I examined this image from the 1977 exhibition ‘Archaeology of the City.’ Here I was interested with the large diagonal element in the mid ground appearing as a 1:1 object displayed within the exhibition. However what that object is remains a mystery. From this I propose my curatorial strategy as the Formulation of 1:1 - in respect to relationship and meaning through isolation. With the employment of fragmentation, Rossi’s projects are rendered to a deconstructed state; as essentially unknown artefacts thus removing their inherent meanings. The use of walls is purposeful here acting as directional indicators to aid in the discovery of these objects within space through open and narrow configurations. As one moves through the exhibition, they are afforded glimpses and partial views of various fragmented objects. Their unknown states allows visitors to read the display at 1:1 and formulate their own subjective understanding. 78

I N D EX

N OT E S

Step 1. Residence Core Material: multi-residential project Student will be provided with a selected Rossi project (some built, some unbuilt), pre-selected from the MAXXI Archive. Each project is also documented within Alberto Ferlenga’s important (and now rare) book, originally published by Electa (in Italian) and later by Kohnemann (in English). Students will be supplied with their project fact sheet from Ferlenga’s book as as support for their investigations. Coinciding with Aldo Rossi’s interest and subsequently Alberto Ferlenga’s exhibition themes, students will respond to 3 separate prompts: City (architectural projects), Monument (cultural projects) and Domestic or Analogous Objects (domestic set-ups).

dio 8. MAXXI STUDIO: the Home, the Monument, the Museum

N OT ES

(Above) Iteration 1, North East Axo View (Below) Iteration 1, South West Axo View 96

(Above) East Elevation (NTS) (Below) South Elevation (NTS) N OT ES

(Above) Perspective from within, shadowless (Below) Perspective from within 98

(Above) Iteration 2, City Axo (Below) Iteration 3, City Axo N OT ES

(Above) Perspective from within, view to overhead colonnade (Below) Perspective from within, view to silo form 100

(Above) Iteration 3, City Axo (Below) City Perspective, view down central courtyard N OT ES

101

The Monument: Initial notes, sketches and form ideas 102

N OT ES

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(Above) Iteration 1, NW View (Below) Iteration 1, SE View 104

(Above) Iteration 2, NW View (Below) Iteration 2, SE View N OT ES

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(Above) Iteration 3, NW View (Below) Iteration 3, SE View 106

(Above) Iteration 4, NW View (Below) Iteration 4, SE View N OT ES

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(Above) Iteration 5, NW View (Below) Iteration 5, SE View 108

(Above) Iteration 6, NW View (Below) Iteration 6, SE View N OT ES

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The Domestic Object: Initial notes, sketches and form ideas 110

N OT ES

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N OT ES

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(Above) Iteration 1, Front Elevation (Below) Iteration 1, Axo View 114

(Above) Iteration 2, Axo View (Below) Iteration 3, Axo Veiw N OT ES

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(Above) Iteration 4, Axo View (Below) Iteration 5, Axo View 116

(Above) Iteration 6, Axo View (Below) Iteration 7, Axo View N OT ES

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(Above) Iteration 8, SW Axo View (Below) Iteration 8, NE Axo View 118

(Above) Iteration 9, SW Axo View (Below) Iteration 9, NE Axo View N OT ES

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Step 2. Exhibition Core Material: Architectural Exhibition Students will select 3 images from the Studio Resource Folder. These photographs record iconic architecture exhibitions from the past. Together these photographs capture the changing nature of the architecture exhibition over time, but also indexes the changing attitudes, style and concerns of the architecture discipline.

2.1 One Room (Week 4) Task: Design an exhibition gallery by analysing your selected photograph. add one gallery room to distill and project key spatial or environmental attitudes of the exhibition design. Use the material you have from Step 1 as the content of your exhibition. Prompt: Analyse how space, ‘art object,’ and viewer (the camera lens), audiences (if present), and any other contextual material are organised to form the broader ‘environment of display’ captured and projected by your photograph. Requirement: One perspective (serialising your photograph) Create and Define the ‘Curatorial Design’ Strategy for each Exhibition (use Wilfried Kuehn’s List as a guide only) SOURCE MATERIAL: Selected photograph of your exhibition project (primary) Fact sheet on your exhibition projects (primary) Wilfried Kuehn’s 1:1 Reading on ‘Curatorial Design’ Strategies - from the Subject Resource Folder (secondary)

dio 8. MAXXI STUDIO: the Home, the Monument, the Museum

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N OT ES

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Testing the perspective of Exhibition 2.1 concept 126

Iteration 1 of Exhibition 2.1 N OT ES

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N OT ES

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Experimenting with Exhibition 2.2 concept The curatorial strategy is insertion. Using the techniques of separation, fragmentation and repetition 130

Using the Monument project. Insertion of stair elements and columns into the upper slab volume

N OT ES

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Using the Monument project. Insertion of stair elements and columns into the upper slab volume 132

Using the Monument project. Insertion of columns within the stairs N OT ES

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Using the Monument project. Insertion of the stairs within the colonnade 134

Refining the concept. Simplifying. The colonnade and column as is within the slab volume N OT ES

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N OT ES

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Exhibition 2.3 concept exploration 138

Exhibition 2.3 concept exploration N OT ES

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Step 3. Design a Museum Design a museum on the present MAXXI site using all your Step 1 projects and one of your Step 2 Curatorial Design Strategies. When complete, your design will be considered both a ‘building’ (a museum) and ‘object of display’ (an architecture exhibition). • In your Step 3 project the original Rossi residential building allocated to you at the beginning of semester is reborn as a museum for displaying itself. In this scenario both the museum as a typological instrument and the architecture exhibition as pseudo art display withdraw simultaneously to new forms of architecture born within the concept of the museum. Overview…Until now… Architecture – from Step 1 Design a museum by using the catalogue of forms, spatialities, affects, orientations.. you have developed in your Step 1 designs (and aspects of your original Rossi Residential building if necessary). • Your Step 1 projects are always already domestic because each is generated from a Rossi residential project. There need be no explicit domestic function, program or custom present to ‘produce’ domesticity. Step 1 projects and the original Rossi residential building are formal material prompts for your museum. Exhibition – from Step 2 Design a museum by selecting one of your curatorial design strategies (and its Step 2 ROOM(S)) as a guide. Your curatorial design strategy and associated rooms selected from Step 2 provide the ‘DNA’ of your Step 3 project. • Your Step 2 projects are both domestic and museological because each displays your Step 1 residential work yet is ‘modified’ by the practices and percepts of the exhibition. Your chosen curatorial strategy is the operative method for you to organise your formal material. Program Provide ALL the key programmatic spaces identified (in red) in the Hadid pdf plans provided to you. Sizes of the original spaces do not need to be replicated. Consider the entire MAXXi plot if it is of interest; the interior of the building footprint across all levels and the external site / landscaping. Additional Prompts • Study the provided MAXXI drawings, the buildings layout, organisation, spatial rhythms, circulation, programming, public / private space… • Think about the different design discourses, formalisms and aesthetic affects of the work of Aldo Rossi and Zaha Hadid and how these may contribute to the ‘attitude’ of your design. • Experiment with how the MAXXI may ‘receive’ and ‘respond’ to your design DURING the design process AND how your design may ‘receive’ and ‘respond’ to the MAXXI.

dio 8. MAXXI STUDIO: the Home, the Monument, the Museum

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MAXXI Museum Ground Floor - Area Diagram Examining the MAXXI and understanding the programs and spaces N OT ES

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MAXXI Museum First Floor - Area Diagram 142

MAXXI Museum Second Floor - Area Diagram N OT ES

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Attempting to understand the vertical relationship through overlay

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Examining the ceiling plan. Looking at the striations of the MAXXI. Attempting to understand moments of confluence. Horizontal movement and vertical movement. N OT ES

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Excerpt from Alberto Ferlenga and Stephen Sartarelli, The Theaters of the Architect in Perspecta , 1990, Vol. 26, Theater, Theatricality, and Architecture (1990), pp. 191-202. (MIT Press, 1990) 152

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153

Aldo Rossi 97

survive; it was a way of expressing the fundamental search for happiness.2 Rossi’s poetic, almost intimate vision – architecture is like a love story, architecture should be forgotten – seems to be very much at odds with the positive tone of L’architettura della città, a fundamental text in the contemporary debate, which first came out in 1966 and has been republished several times in various languages: it suffices to look at the table of contents to see the crucial role played by architectural facts, and urban structures and elements: Fatti urbani e teoria della città, Struttura dei fatti urbani, Gli elementi primari e l’area, etc. Aldo Rossi often remembers with tender irony his sound convictions at the time he wrote that book. There he declared: I understand architecture in the positive sense, as a creation inseparable from civil life and from the society in which it is made manifest … thus architecture is consubstantial with the formation of civilization, being a permanent, universal and necessary fact.3 But actually for him there has never been any discontinuity between theory, project, construction and the artist’s own life. The work of Aldo Rossi lends itself to various kinds of interpretation: the architect sees in him the rationalist legacy of the Viennese Adolf Loos4 or of Italian classicism; the art historian sees in him the metropolitan atmosphere of Giorgio de Chirico and of Mario Sironi; the historian of ideas might perceive, in the differences between the text of 1966 and the Autobiography of 1981, the transition from public to private man, from commitment to history to absorption in the self, typical of periods of crisis; the critic of ideology will see in Aldo Rossi’s repetitions of form the ambiguity of the poetic, the nostalgia for art and order; those who love literature will be touched by Rossi’s sense of responsibility in a personal choice, the identification of the self with the totality of a work. Poetry is so important for Rossi himself, who quotes several poets as having influenced his wish to be an architect, and reports his answer to the persistent questions he is asked about some features in his architecture: ‘I have translated the last lines of a Hölderlin poem (“Halfte des Lebens”) into my architecture: “Die Maurern stehn / Sprachlos und kalt, im Winde / Klirren die Fahnen” [The walls stand / mute and cold, in the wind / the banners creak].’5 The political optimism of the sixties obviously cannot return, but Rossi’s fundamental ideas about architecture which first appear in his

Excerpt from Patrizia Lombardo, ‘Aldo Rossi: The White Walls of the City’. In Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese. (London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2003) 154

98 Cities, Words and Images

early theoretical text are still present in his 1981 autobiography: the rejection of any functionalist conception of architecture, which cannot be reduced to functions, despite the efforts of many modern schools to do so; the idea that city and architecture coincide, one being inconceivable without the other, and that the city (or architecture) lives through time. This means that the city has a history in which memory and forgetting are intertwined, for cities change through time but still keep their identity. Because of this vision of the city across time, functionalism is ineffectual, as Rossi says in his autobiography, at one point where he is referring to his own book, L’architettura della città. In fact places that have been built for one purpose can subsequently be put to a different use: ‘I have seen old palaces now inhabited by many families, convents transformed into schools, amphitheatres transformed into football ﬁelds; and such transformations have always come about most effectively where neither an architect nor some shrewd administrator have intervened.’6 This typological freedom fascinates the architect, who loves unexpected events that jeopardize function, such as the taverns under the arches of the Schnell-Bahn in Berlin, or the twostorey kiosks behind the cathedral of Ferrara. His motto will never be ‘form and function’, but is rather form and memory. In cities, different historical periods accumulate, within the buildings different functions follow one another, making room for people’s lives. Of all the photographs of the Gallaratese (the housing estate in Milan built by Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi in 1969–74), Rossi says he likes best the ones where children are playing under the arcades of the building near the pilasters: he likes this proximity of human beings and stone, of biography and construction; he likes the interplay of the stable and the transitory, of the scientiﬁc and the existential, or the dream of an architecture seen through a child’s eyes.

Lombardy Indeed what has been seen through a child’s eyes lasts forever. The images of childhood, the buildings of one’s childhood, ‘in the ﬂux of the city’ are fundamental; they form the core of a constant quest, creating an expectation, that of an event which, as in Giorgio de Chirico’s pictures, may never materialize: ‘I am more interested in preparations, in what might happen on a midsummer night. In this way, architecture can be beautiful before it is used; there is beauty in the wait, in the room prepared for the wedding, in the ﬂowers and silver before High Mass.’7

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Aldo Rossi feels he has never lost his ties with Lombardy: the beloved Sacri Monti,8 the statue of San Carlone in Arona (Lake Maggiore between Piedmont and Lombardy), the lakeside Hotel Sirena (a building of bad taste with its acid green walls, but promising happiness, holidays, meetings with young girls), the Galleria in Milan, where the fog penetrates on winter days, and the horrible piazza Leonardo da Vinci, also in Milan, where Rossi, with other students of the Politecnico, spent long hours taking measurements. Take, for example, that architectural structure typical of Lombardy and which can be found in Milan, in the working-class quarter of porta Ticinese dating from the end of the nineteenth century: houses with balconies. This Milanese typology is a concrete image of the city where Aldo Rossi was born, and fully inspired his Gallaratese project, where the whole construction extends along a gallery or passage with balconies. Thus time and geography, the past and the local style combine to provide the model for a piece of modern architecture, for the gallery is also ‘an internal raised street’. The places of childhood and of youth also include those experienced on journeys and long visits: Lombardy and its images blend with Belo Horizonte in Brazil, and with Seville. They can also stretch as far as Modena and Parma, as far as the image of the Tempio Malatestiano in Rimini or of Leon Battista Alberti’s Sant’Andrea church in Mantua, which Rossi loved so much. The natural and urban landscape of the Po valley prompted the construction of his cemetery in Modena (1971 competition), whose conception is inﬂuenced by the ‘world’ of the Po and by what Rossi felt in the public gardens at Ferrara or Seville: ‘a mixture of real experience, image, and afternoons wasted in Ferrara or along the river itself.’9 Architecture is time and place: stones and buildings, chronological time, existential time, and weather merge in a strange feeling where movement and stillness are not contradictory: Between the houses of childhood and death, between those of play and work, stands the house of everyday life, which architects have called many things – residence, habitation, dwelling, etc. – as if life could develop in one place only. Through my own life and craft I have partly lost the concept of a ﬁxed place, and at times I superimpose different situations and different times, as my reader has already seen.10 Aldo Rossi’s Italy is that of Milan and ‘need not contradict the notion of the citizen of the world’;11 his Italy it is the Italy of certain interiorized

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post-war images; of the Renaissance; of the Po valley. One can find the atmosphere of some of Rossellini, Fellini, Bertolucci or Visconti’s films. Rossi’s Italy is also international Italy, brimming over with different cultures. It is above all the Italy of the Hapsburgs, imbued with modern German and Viennese culture: Aldo Rossi’s influences include Adolf Loos, Georg Trakl, Walter Benjamin, Mies van der Rohe (the modern architect who, along with Loos, he admires the most), and even Raymond Roussel, Melville and Conrad. An image, a sentence, a city, a building recalls others, beyond any frontier, in an endless flow of connections.

The analogous city Rossi has often spoken of the analogous city – he refers to it in his Autobiography – suggesting that it is not a concept or a stable definition but an image, the very possibility of joining images, ‘a circle’ of relationships ‘that is never closed’, ‘the unlimited contaminatio of things, of correspondences’.12 The analogous city is very close to Baudelaire’s ‘Correspondances’: an urban image can be associated to another urban image, but also to an atmosphere, a mood, a feeling. Rossi’s style in the Autobiography is very different from the assertive tone of The Architecture of the City; it is elliptical, not conforming to an idea of treatise or system, nor to that of a continuous narrative. His mode of writing is that of fragmentation in the modern style, it belongs to the tradition of Italian hermeticism, proceeding by brief statements which, in their apparent simplicity, refer to suggestions in which theoretical intent and personal experience are inseparable, just as in his architecture the rational approach is combined with a violent and chilling effort striving to recapture an emotion, an event reconsidered and reviewed at a distance. There is no impressionism in Rossi’s work, either in his writing or in his architecture, since his respect for the subjectivity of the artist is not sentimental but intellectual. Rossi’s work eschews all irrationalism, aiming to integrate modern rationalism with that complex thing that is the human person with his feelings, obsessions, contradictions, memories. While organizing the international architecture section at the fifteenth Triennale exhibition in Milan, Rossi wrote the introduction to the joint work Architettura razionale13 and made the film – called, after Adolf Loos’s essay, Ornament and Crime – which was ‘a collage of architectural works and pieces of different films which tried to introduce the discourse of architecture into life and at the same time view it as a background for human events’.14 For the Milanese architect, his discipline is a sort of science of the subject, where the universal and the general of known and recognizable

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forms would not annihilate the peculiarity, the uniqueness of a personal experience. Rossi’s concept of the analogous city should not be interpreted in the abstract, Platonic sense, for it is the idea that comes after the event, after individual experiences, and it is presented in a realistic manner. The analogous city is the image of a place, of an architectural pattern, of an existing town, which might be composed by elements of different existing cities, and one that persists in the memory. Rossi’s analogy is produced by an accumulation of objects, in a richness of references that, paradoxically, results in simplicity – the purism of the primordial elements or elementary forms that have often been discussed in connection with him. Memory can superimpose various elements or recognize similarity within difference: recollection and analogical association produce changes and metamorphosis in the same way as the altered usage of buildings transforms functions: ‘Ever since my first projects, where I was interested in purism, I have loved contaminations, slight changes, self-commentaries, and repetitions.’15 Taking the example of the Milan Galleria or Alberti’s Sant’Andrea, Rossi proposes an analogy between architectural structures and mist. Constructed forms and geography merge together – contaminate, to use the term cherished by Rossi: ‘If one enters Sant’Andrea in Mantua on those days when the fog has penetrated the interior, one sees that no space so resembles the countryside, the Po lowland, as the measured and controlled space of this building.’16 The ‘contamination’ produced by analogy is the principle itself of collage – and one of Rossi’s 1977 collages was called ‘Analogous city’. Nevertheless analogy consists in the detachment, in the rational division among elements, without any fusion or confusion. Aldo Rossi’s analogy belongs to the type of the catalogue, where hierarchies are expunged and flattened out (mist, a meteorological element, is on the same level as a building), but order is indispensable (the mist is a different thing from the building, it is the feature of the Po landscape that inspires the re-examination of this landscape in terms of Alberti’s rational forms). Aldo Rossi finds an analogy to his art in the work of Raymond Roussel, where a decision orders the composition: ‘I detested the arbitrary disorder that is indifference to order, a kind of moral obtuseness, complacent well-being, forgetfulness.’17

Nostalgia The architecture of Aldo Rossi, in the projects that have never been carried out as well as those that have, is born out of the tension between mathematical, scientiﬁc order and the relative disorder of personal, subjective life. Yet although a building, a town, is always in a

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Re-framing concept. Attempting to reorganise my thoughts and ideas. MAXXI + Rossi. The City. Deep Structure. 160

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Palazzo della Ragione, Padua Ground floor plan from 1425 to present

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Organisation via grid lines. Deep Structure Focus

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Aureli, Pier Vittorio. ‘The Difficult Whole’. Log, no. 9 (2007): 39–61. Bandini, Micha. ‘ALDO ROSSI’. AA Files, no. 1 (1981): 105–11. Bergdoll, Barry. ‘At Home in The Museum?’ Log, no. 15 (2009): 35–48. Ciorra, Pippo. ‘Aldo Rossi’s Palazzo Dello Sport’. Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 45, no. 3 (1992): 147–49. https://doi.org/10.2307/1425251. Ferlenga, Alberto. Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of an Architect. Konemann, 2002. Ferlenga, Alberto, and Stephen Sartarelli. ‘The Theaters of the Architect’. Perspecta 26 (1990): 191–202. https://doi. org/10.2307/1567162. Forster, Kurt W. ‘Show Me: Arguments For an Architecture Of Display’. Log, no. 20 (2010): 55–64. Ghirardo, Diane. Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture. United States: Yale University Press, 2019.

Lobsinger, Mary Louise. ‘The New Urban Scale in Italy: On Aldo Rossi’s “L’architettura Della Città”’. Journal of Architectural Education (1984-) 59, no. 3 (2006): 28–38. Lombardo, Patrizia. ‘Aldo Rossi: The White Walls of the City’. In Cities, Words and Images: From Poe to Scorsese, edited by Patrizia Lombardo, 96–107. Language, Discourse, Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2003. https://doi. org/10.1057/9780230286696_5. Pelkonen, Eeva-Liisa. Exhibit A : Exhibitions that Transformed Architecture, 1948-2000. London, United Kingdom: Phaidon Press Ltd, 2018. Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 2010. Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press Academic, 1984. Rossi, Aldo, and Bernard Huet. ‘Architecture, Furniture and Some of My Dogs’. Perspecta 28 (1997): 95–113. https://doi. org/10.2307/1567195. Rowe, Colin, and Fred Koetter. Collage City. Cambridge, United States: MIT Press, 1978.

Kühn, Wilfried. “1:1.” In Displayed Spaces: New Means Of Architecture Presentation Through Exhibitions, edited by Roberto Gigliotti, 73-88. Spector Books, 2015.

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