Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Robert Venturi,
(New York:
The Museum of Modern Art Papers on
Architecture, 1966), 88.
2. Ibid.
3. I prefer the translation of
as "singularity of the
urban rather than "individuality
of the urban artifact," which was used in
the Anlerican translation of Alde Rossi's
An urban arti
fact presupposes an already materialized
object-form crafted with an artistic
intention. Though Rossi would also have
interpreted as a materialized
object-form, I believe that "urban,event"
refers more directely to what was at
stake in Rossi's view on the architecture
of the city; namely, the event - whether
as a political decision or collective will
that makes legible the evolution of the
city by disrupting the continuity through
which it forms itself. See Aida Rossi,
trans. Diane
Ghirardo and Joan Ockman (Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press, 1982).
TYPOLOGY AND THE SINGULARITY OF THE URBAN EVENT
IN ALDO ROSSI'S EARLY THEORETICAL WORK. 19S3-1964.
- Aldo Rossi,
Near the end of
Robert Venturi writes, "An architecture of Complexity and
Contradiction does not forsake the whole."1 Venturi recog
nizes that it is a commitment to the whole, not the relativity
of a liberated fragment, which characterizes a formal, com
plex, and contradictory architectural language. A
"because the whole is difficult to achieve."z The degree
of difficulty of the whole is determined by the number of its
parts. For Venturi, given a range from one to several, duality
itself - two parts - is an aspiration to a difficult unity.
This idea of the difficult whole contributes to a reading
of Aldo Rossi's architectural theory, the complexity of which
cannot be explained by reducing it to a totalizing concept,
like disciplinary autonomy, or by resorting to a vague notion
of multidisciplinarity. While for Venturi the difficult whole
is a compositional device, in Rossi this idea represents the
formal and political understanding of the relationship
between the city and architecture.
Rossi's theoretical contribution might be best situated in
the difficult duality established by the pivotal ideas that
emerged from his views on architecture and the city. One is
the concept of as a view of the city and
its process of becoming, and the other is the concept of the
as a concrete category of the
architecture of the city.
Rossi puts these antithetical concepts into a difficult,
complex, and problematic relationship that is at the core of
his thought: the impossible relationship between and
or between personal invention - the scale of the
architectural event - and the identification of a collective
horizon - at the scale of the city. To state it simply, the con
cept of typology tries to include the city in all of its dimen
sions, while the urban event highlights the singularity of the
architectural intervention as a partial, concrete, and identifi
able contribution to the development of the city.
39
Log
2007 no.9 pages 39-61
ISSN: 1547-4690
4. Carlo elmo, "Attraverso i testi'\ in
Aldo Rossi, opere (Modena: Nuova Alfa
Editoriale, 1990), 85.
5. Aldo Rossi, "II concerto di tradizione
nell'architettura neoclassica .milanese,"
Societa, n. l (1956). Reprinted in Aldo
Rossi, Scritti Scefti sull'architettura e fa
citta, 1956-1972, Rosalo Bonicalzi, ed.
(Milan: Citta Studi Edizioni, 1975), 4.
What is the meaning of this complex and often contra
dictory duality, of this "difficult whole" that is not always
resolved in a clear dialectic, even if one is strongly suggested
by the rational economy of the urban project?
I maintain that the difficult whole in Rossi's early work
is the attempt to be in radical continuity with the theoretical
tension expressed by the Modern Movement, while simulta
nesmsly recognizing the irreducibility of urban complexity
and subjective experience to easy common denominators.
To support this hypothesis, I will make a critical analysis
of the formative path that led to Rossi's contribution to
typological studies. This path covers the period between 1953,
the year in which his first article was published, and 1964,
the year in which he wrote his first extensive essays on
typology. This analysis is a very selective one, focusing mainly
on those aspects that have been overshadowed by Rossi's best
known theoretical work. This period has never been thor
oughly analyzed, either then or today, even though it repre
sents the most important, intense, and complex part of
Rossi's theoretical development.
Rossi's formative years can be divided into three signifi
cant phases. During the first phase, from 1953 to 1957, Rossi
wrote several essays in which he began to form a realist
attitude toward history and social, political, and cultural de
velopment. As Carlo almo has remarked, Rossi's first inter
ventions are made through "continuous shifts of meaning,
all based on the deepening of the concept of tradition."4
Rossi often identified the concept of tradition with the con
cept of realiry in order to understand tradition not as "subju
gation to the formal world expressed by antiquity,"5 but as
reason applied to reality in order to extrapolate lines of
structural continuity that could contribute to a more con
scious perception of the present.
The second phase, from 1958 to 1963, in which Rossi's
work was mostly reviews and monographic essays, repre
sents a period of broad and complex research, at times f r a g ~
mented, on methods for a general discourse on architecture
and the city. This phase, which coincides with his collabora
tion with the magazine Casabella Continuita, is the period of
Rossi's education, mythicized by scholars, and often read
superficially. Here, Rossi moves through a vast and strongly
transdisciplinary theoretical landscape - from urban plan
ning to literature, from art to sociology, from urban geogra
phy to economy, from philosophy to an accurate analysis of
canonical architectural works - which addressed the pro
grammatic needs of the emerging postwar city.
40
FOR ROSSI, THE MOVE FROM NEO
REALISM TO REALISM IN FILM WAS
EPITOMIZED IN LUCHINO VISCONTI'S
SENsa, 1954. STILL FROM A SCENE
SHOT IN. LA FENICE, WHERE ARCHI
TECTURE IS A BACKDROP FOR
HUMANITY.
The third phase, from 1964 to 1966, includes his first
attempt to define typological studies through research and
programmatic interventions, concluding in the analytical
attempt to found a theory of the city. Rossi is influenced by
the studies of the French school of urban geography, which
is mentioned repeatedly in Rossi's. later book, L'Architettura
della citta, and, above all, by the research on type as. an a pri
ori synthesis conducted by Saverio Muratori in the 1950s and
'60s. While Rossi never precisely defined the concept of type,
it clearly emerges that it is not architecture as image, that is,
a merely perceptive fact; rather, type is architecture as a
structural andformal fact, that is, as a complex experience.
To revisit Rossi's manifold approach to the problem of
the city and its relationship with architecture, particularly
during his formative years, also means to challenge the
canonical (and simplistic) reading of Rossi as the father of
so-called autonomous architecture. In Rossi's view, autonomy
is not at all an a priori ideology - a disciplinary distance
from contemporary culture - but simply a political and for
mal position, a preliminary economy of discourse rather than
the research for a disciplinary self-defense indifferent to its
social and political framework. In order to disentangle the
complexity of Rossi's development, which is riot reducible to
disciplinary concerns, I propose to characterize the three
phases of his formation with three categories that elucidate
his struggle to embrace the difficult whole of the city and
architecture.
The first category is realism, that is, the attempt, as in
Italian neorealist cinema, to document man's life in every
dimension of space, time, and place. For Rossi, realism is the
41
6. See Aldo Rossi, "Autobiographical
notes on my training, etc., December
1971," in Aldo Rossi. Life and Work of an
Architect, Alberto Ferlenga, ed. (Cologne:
Konemann, 2001), 24.
7. See Giovanni Durbiano, I nuovi maeJ'tri.
Architetti tra politica e cu/tura nel
dopoguerra (Venice: Marsilio, 2000).
ability to represent this dimension through architectural
events. The second category is rationalism, or the attempt to
establish a highly specific knowledge of a disciplinary land
scape that cannot be reduced to simplistic formulas. The third
category is theory, which for Rossi is an attempt to construct
a body of knowledge that serves not only as a recipe for
research but is also a teachable methodology. The sequence
of these three categories - realism, rationalism, and theory
traces the development of the theory of the difficult whole, a
contribution to architectural and urban theory that has thus
far been simplistically reduced to all-embracing discursive
terms such as disciplinary autonomy or postmodernism.
REALISM AS THE "BUSINESS OF LIVING"
Cinematography is the on{y art able to document man's life in its
total dimension of space, time, andplace.
- Vasco Pratolini, Per un saggio sui rapporti
fra letteratura e cinema, 1948.
The education of a great intellectual often includes at the
moment of its beginnings not only the seeds of that person's
future development, but often also the final result. In Aldo
Rossi's case, the very first years of his education can be seen
as an already conclusive moment in the fundamental cultur
al choices that mark all of his work.
6
Rossi's first crucial experiences were at the Milan
Politecnico, where he joined other students in the struggle
to radically revise the legacy of the Modern Movement and
to recover popular traditions in their aspiration for a new
language removed from both the abstraction of late-mod
ernist architecture and the monumentalism that character
ized the most excessive forms of architecture in fascist Italy.7
Here he also met Ernesto Nathan Rogers, a professor,
founding partner of the firm BBPR, and editor-in-chief of
Casabella Continuita.
In a sense, this moment was a prototype of interdiscipli
nary education, in which the study of architecture was com
bined not only with the study of the city, a subject barely
established in postwar Italy, but also with other disciplines
art, literature, philosophy, cinema, sociology, urban geogra
phy, and, above all, politics. Rossi and his classmates dealt
extensively with these disciplines, which were considered
essential elements in a potential new racconto della realra
(account of reality) being nurtured by the Milanese "Young
Turks" as an alternative to the functionalist impasse implicit
in the most superficial features of modernism. But it was
42
8. Alberto Asor Rosa, "Letteratura e
Cinema" in No'Vecento primo secondo e
terzo (Florence: Sansoni, 1999, 2004); 186.
9. While neorealism was concerned more
with the filming of the everyday lives of
ordinary people, the aspiration of realism
as exemplified in the films of Luchino
Visconti was to elevate the "ordinary" to
a morc conscious and politically militant
filmic form. The transition from neo
realism. to realism was especially due to
the increased involvement of the cultural
politics of the Italian Communist Party
in the film industry. Intellectuals affiliat
ed with the politics of the Communist
Party, like Visconti, opposed a more dra
matic and epic filmic style, which was
instrumental in a more politically com
mitted "representation."
10. See Giorgio Cavallaio, Sento (Bologna:
Cappelli, 1977).
11. Cesare Pavese, II Compagno (Turin:
Einaudi, 1950).
12. See Aldo Rossi, "Una educazione real
ista," in Aldo Rotsi, Opere 1958-1987,
Alberto Ferlenga, ed. (Milan: Electa,
1988), 54.
mainly the immediacy of literature and cinema in represent
ing reality through direct experience that, more than archi
tecture, "educated" the young Rossi about the city and its
landscape.
Beginning in the 1940s, the discovery and representation
of the urban landscape as an index of the actual reality lived
by common people was a central theme of cinema and neo
realist literature. In the 1950s, the neorealist movement tried
to achieve what, the young critics Mario Alicata and Gio
vanni de Santis had early on defined as the ({story" as an origi-
nal and exemplary form of "realism.
JJ8
The idea was to free
realism from the simplistic role of a document of reality in
order to intensify the episodic facts of everyday life as exem-
plary historical and social cases. Luchino Visconti's film
Senso (1954) exemplified the transition from neorealism to a
more rigorous form of realism
9
in depicting the history of
Italy's war of independence through the epic vicissitudes of a
private tragedy.l0 This narrative pattern had been adopted
earlier in literature. Rossi referred to Cesare Pavese's novel II
Compagno (The Comrade)l1 and Visconti's film Ossessione as
the cornerstones of his "realist education."12 II Compagno rep
resented the most rigorous, politically committed realism, in
which the everyday landscape of its unemployed and unedu
cated protagonist, and his transformation into a communist
activist, becomes the archetype for the experience of a gen
eration. Significantly; this transformation takes place against
the backdrop of two cities - Rome and Turin - which con
stitute the dramatic climate of Pavese's austere realism. The
implicit ideological message is deeply reflected in the urban
form, which is not represented monumentally, but rather in
its implications for daily experience.
It is important to highlight here the two ways in which
cinema and literature influenced Rossi's realist education.
On the one hand there is the influence of engage realism in
inspiring the overall act of commitment to the city as a place
of everyday life; on the other is a more specific, personal
influence on Rossi that leads him to the recognition of every
day urban life through typical figures that coincide with
urban images or architectural situations that can be easily
identified and coded. Rossi emphasized that his discovery of
the architecture of the city occurred in scenes where archi
tecture is something "atmospheric," a background not
reducible to the restrictive characteristics of function and
program. Rather, architecture is a daily theater indifferent
to, yet participating in, what. Pavese defined as II mestiere di
vivere: the "business of living." At the same time, the
43
n. During his lectures, Rossi used to ref
erence cinema in an almost obsessive
manner. His passion for cinema is also
documented in a movie he 'himself
directed, called Ornamento e Delitto, in
homage to Adolf Loos's famous essay of
the same name. The movie was produced
for the XV Milan Triennale, and was
made by collaging together different
films, especially those by Visconti.
14. Aida Rossi, "La citta e la periferia,"
Casabella Continuita, n. 253 (1961): 45;
also in Rossi, Scritti scelti, 173-74. My
translation.
15. Aldo Rossi, "I1linguaggio di Perret,"
II Contemporaneo, n. B (1955).
knowledge of the city Rossi gained through film should not
be considered a literal preference for the instability of