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Transcript of Thesis Meaning Building
Copyright
by
Jeremy J. Beaudry
2002
Meaning Building:
Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory
by
Jeremy John Beaudry, BFA
Thesis
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School
of The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Science in Architectural Studies
The University of Texas at Austin
December 2002
Meaning Building:
Aldo Rossi and the Practice of Memory
APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
_____________________________
Michael Benedikt
_____________________________
Stephen L. Ross
To Mom, Dad, and Meredith for unwavering support
Nothing touches a work of art so little as words of criticism:they always result in more or less fortunatemisunderstandings. Things aren’t all so tangible and sayableas people would usually have us believe; most experiences areunsayable, they happen in a space that no word has everentered, and more unsayable than all other things are worksof art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures besideour own small, transitory life.
Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
+ preface
This thesis asks questions about meaning in architecture and the
importance of memory in that meaning. As an investigation of how
architecture means, this work begins with my story because I am the subject
of this thesis and because, as such, I am mostly responsible for the meaning I
“find” in the world; that is, the meaning I make of it. That is meaning
building, which is really what this thesis is written of. (Notice I did not write
“written about.”)
Architecture happened to me. It continues to happen to me.
Architecture happened to me, and I remember it.
There was a time when architecture happened to me and I was not
conscious of its happening. That architecture was an architecture of the
everyday, and, as such, I could not see it. The walls around me and the roofs
over my head were invisible. In fact, that which I experienced and perceived
was life spilling over the edges of architecture: inside to sleep and eat,
outside to play and travel; me in my bedroom, my sister in the living room,
my father standing in the doorway, my mother walking down the hall. The
world contracts or expands depending on our relationship to very specific
spaces; our perception of the world is ever (never) complete depending on
the edges of architecture.
vi
Later, there was a time when architecture happened to me and I
became conscious of its happening. I remember it. I remembered it. Meaning,
I first became conscious of architecture happening to me as it happened to
me in my memory. Meaning, the architecture was just an image, but an
image of such profound significance that it single-handedly provoked me to
embark on what can only be called my “life’s work”—meaning architecture.
Meaning meaning. Meaning building. Meaning building. Building meaning.
Making meaning out of the memory of architecture.
Curiously, I first noticed architecture as it appeared to me in an image,
as a brief flash in my memory. I was a painter; I quickly drew it on paper.
Where did it come from? It was familiar yet vague; it was the place I had
never been but revisited everyday for the past year. Some ancient loggia in
Italy—in Cinque Terre, by the sea? or in Rome, on the bank of the Tiber?
(The previous year, I had lived in Rome and studied art and art history.) I
became obsessed with the image. I made paintings about it, returning to it,
exploring it (at this time I was working in a dingy studio in the midst of a
very cold and gray Philadelphia winter).
With the passing of a few years, architecture and its memory has
asserted itself as the subject of my paintings and drawings and writing.
Then I see an image in a theory of architecture seminar: Aldo Rossi’s
Teatro del Mondo built for the 1980 Venice Biennale—and it’s like that image
of the loggia. I am staring at this slide projection of Rossi’s Theater of the
World floating on a barge around the canals of Venice, and how can it be
that I remember it? Of course, I knew I had never seen it before, never
vii
stepped foot inside this tiny little theater. But it still meant so much to me,
and I knew it
Fig. 1. Aldro Rossi, Il Teatro del Mondo, Venice, 1979. Reprinted fromGianni Braghieri, Aldo Rossi: Works and Projects, 3rd Ed. (Barcelona 1997), 118.
was a place that I would always miss. (A while later, I returned to Italy and
to Venice. Everywhere I turned I saw the ghosted image of the theater
drifting by—rocking gently in front of San Giorgio, docked at the Piazza San
Marco, mimicking the old customs house near the Giudecca.) Rossi writes in
viii
A Scientific Autobiography: “In order to be significant, architecture must be
forgotten, or must present only an image for reverence which subsequently
becomes confounded with memories.” This is the place where our
autobiographies converge.
As a note to the reader: Please keep in mind the spirit of Rilke’s
cautionary epigram—that there is much about a work of art, much about the
world, which is “unsayable.” I have endeavored to encourage that extra-
verbal dimension in this project by including elements that are visual (my
paintings and drawings, for example) and that are analogically related to the
focus of this thesis. Do not always look for answers in what can be patently
“said.”
An extended work such as this thesis is necessarily influenced by so
many people and experiences—some fleeting, some more substantial—and it
is difficult to give each of them the credit they deserve. That said, I am
particularly grateful to Steve Ross, whose expansive mind and radical
pedagogical style has greatly contributed to the development
(methodologically and conceptually) of this thesis as well as my thinking
about architecture in general. During the course of his Practice Theory
seminar in the fall of 2001, many challenging and fruitful discussions with
him and my classmates provoked me to reevaluate general assumptions
about the very nature of architecture which I had accepted as true.
Michael Benedikt was instrumental in the completion of this work.
His encyclopedic knowledge of architecture and his skillful review of the
manuscript have improved it greatly. I would also like to thank Samantha
Krukowski of the Radio-Television-Film department in the College of
ix
Communication, who provided many insightful comments during the early
stages of my work.
Finally, I must give great thanks to my interdisciplinary studies co-
conspirators, the small (very small) group of categorically illusive mavericks
to which I belong—Eleanor Eichenbaum and Hillary Proknow. These two
incredibly intelligent and creative people gave me great support and
encouragement during my time at the university. Together we shared many
frustrations and many more successes.
x
+ table of contents
preface | vi
+ introduction: meaning building as thesis | 2
+ working definition of an analogical system | 8
+ middles: territories of meaning | 12
+ tacit knowing and material practice | 18
+ from The Architecture of the City to A Scientific Autobiography | 33
+ active memory | 45
+ Aldo Rossi and meaning building | 60
+ drawing on architecture drawing on memory drawing on meaning | 71
+ epilogue: l’architecture des ombres | 81
appendix A: consequential data | 87
appendix B: excerpts from A Scientific Autobiography | 96
bibliography | 101
vita | 107
xi
An Architecture of Memory (1st Room)
1
+ introduction: meaning building as thesis
The goal of this thesis is to consider Aldo Rossi’s writing, drawing,
and architecture as a provisional gathering of components that comes
together to mean more than the sum of those individual components.1 Bound
together analogically, this structure frames a multidimensional, in-between
space where the richness of memory and the progressive practice of making
collaborate to elicit poetic meaning. However, the repercussions of this
program of analysis are manifold: for one, it suggests a novel approach to
understanding Rossi’s oeuvre and practice as comprised equally of his
buildings, writings, and drawings. In exploring the intersections and
superimpositions of these creative processes and products, my method
circumvents the reductive and the taxonomical, and retreats from definitive
statements; it desires to be of its subject rather than about it. By seeking out
this analogical system, this approach also points to the character of the
experience Rossi intends the inhabitants of his buildings to have: it is an
engagement with the architecture that is conceived of as a complex
admixture of memory and experience, history and invention. If Rossi
appears committed to both a strictly formal aesthetic and a rigid theory of
1 I am indebted to Steve Ross for my understanding of the concept of “more-than-ness”, which is very similar to holistic thought, although “more than”that, too. For his treatment of this concept, see Ross (1990 and 1999).
2
design throughout his entire oeuvre, it is so because in that diligence he sees
a logical method by which he can anticipate and encourage meaningful
interaction with his buildings.
Extending beyond the boundaries of Rossi’s particular theory and
practice, though, the larger scope of this inquiry concerns what I call meaning
building, a thesis which intends to interpret, complicate, expand, and enrich
the difficult problem of how we construct and apprehend meaning in the
world—especially the environment built by man.2
Meaning. Building.
Meaning building.
Building meaning.
Which is to say making meaning by building, making meaning in
buildings. Building by building.
One of the main proposals of this thesis is that memory—
autobiographical and collective, each integral to the other—exists as the
foundation upon which meaning is built. Memory affords our connection to
the world. Every aspect of experience becomes enveloped in the process of
memory. It forms our identity as individuals, and it coheres individuals
together to form the identity of social groups. Memory is also the thread
which links the lived-in now with the past and the future: what I remember
of my past contributes to who I am now (at this very moment) and in many
ways affects what I will do in the future. Without memory, meaning
building cannot happen.
2 I am grateful to Andrew Kramer, who is partly responsible for the genesisof the phrase “meaning building”.
3
I believe that Aldo Rossi, whether stated explicitly or not, ultimately
took this claim to task out of the necessity to temper his early polemics about
a theory of design with a commitment to an architecture of intense poetry, of
unquantifiable artistry, an architecture conscious of ifs autobiographical
significance. Underlying the rationalist tendencies of Rossi’s theoretical
work is a deeply felt reverence for the power of memory, both his own as
well as the collective memory of a particular culture or society that is
embodied in key architectural types. And the force of memory permeates
his entire oeuvre to such an extent that it is almost pathological, or cultish, or
verging a nostalgia, at the very least. For Rossi, the process of memory
analogically suggests the evolution and morphology of the physical form of
the city; and a formal language based on a typology of architecture; and, as a
matter of necessity, the repetitive, obsessive, and dynamic nature of his own
creative practice.
It seems evident to me that in the course of finding meaning in the
built environment there must somehow occur a meshing between an
individual’s memory and the embodied memory of the architecture itself.
To speak of a building as having memory is to discover its relationship to
time and to history. In terms of the former, a building will inevitably age—
as time goes by it acquires a kind of patina (although I do not employ this
word only to describe surface qualities) as the physical object registers the
indexical marks of its use over time—the scratches and blemishes, coats of
paint and cosmetic facelifts, additions and subtractions—and as the events
and activities which occur there and transform construct a narrative about its
age. A building’s memory also depends upon its visible relationship to
4
history, which may be manifest through style or type. Each and every
building will always visibly express its relationship to time in this way just
by the very nature of it being a man-made artifact. As physical
constructions, buildings exist in time and in place.
Similarly, as inhabitants of buildings, we each bring to any building a
unique personal history which is dependent upon our individual,
autobiographical memories—this is what we have at our disposal when
confronting the built environment. The special quality of this relationship—
the interaction of memories between building and inhabitant—requires all
the semantic fullness of the word context. Not only does context denote “the
circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in
terms of which it can be fully understood;”3 but it must also be understood
in light of its Latin etymology: contextere, literally “a weaving together.”
Admittedly, many aspects of the context in which we engage buildings are
variable—environmental qualities like time of day and year or psychological
qualities such as mood or intention—but we will always bring with us our
histories, and a building will always display a portion of its history to us.
Memory of architecture, therefore, seems to depend more onour ability to perceive the embodied situation. Moreoverthose situations are subject to particular catalytic moments intime—those instances in which the energies of both thecontainer and the contained become virtuallyindistinguishable. The timing of those moments is uneven,poetic, and anisotropic. It would be impossible for theconstituent elements of a place-memory to sustain a constant
3 Concise Oxford Dictionary, 10th ed., s.v. “context.”
5
equilibrium or frequency of resonance in time. (Bloomer1987:30)
In this way, as users of buildings, we are responsible for meaning building in
that we must bring to architecture our memories and experiences and
complicated selves in order to complete its meaning. We encounter every
possible type and quality of building, and to some degree we will feel
compelled to engage it and we will discover—that is, construct—meaning in
that engagement. Or not. Perhaps only when, as Bloomer claims, the
boundary between the “container” and the “contained” dissipates, when the
embodied memory of the architecture resonates with our memories and
experiences—perhaps then meaning is made.
6
An Architecture of Memory (4th Room)
7
+ working definition of an analogical system
An analogical system is comprised of parts which stand in some
significant relationship to each other; which share certain attributes,
circumstances, or relations; which possess a reciprocal necessity—that is,
each element (analogue) is required in order for the entire structure to be
meaningful. The analogical system is holistic.
Consider this brief etymology of the Greek “analogos”:
aνa- : the usage of the prefix ana- denotes “up, back, again,intensification”
-λογος : logos—and its various declensions (-logy, -ology, etc)—refers to the faculty of speech, the saying of something inregards to a particular subject4
Therefore, analogical denotes a “saying or speaking” between elements
(“back” and “again”) for the purpose of emphasis (“intensification”). Here,
the connotative meaning is clear: in an analogical system, the individual
analogues of that system communicate back and forth, “speaking” about
their relationship in order to bring the particular subject to light. Yet,
speaking is, perhaps, not the ideal gerund here; the action is more of a
pointing to, a gesturing towards in which the analogy is suggested rather than
4 Pocket Oxford Greek Dictionary, revised ed., s.v. “aνa-” and “-λογος.”
8
described: “Analogical thought is archaic, unexpressed, and practically
inexpressible in words” (Jung qtd in Rossi 1976:74).
The analogical system manifests itself in a variety of forms and
cannot be confined to any one milieu. Analogues will be visual, aural,
tactile, olfactory, gustatory. They will be abstract and representational,
images and sounds, words and ideas, objects and textures. The great
expressive potential of analogy resides in this multiplicity of forms and
relationships and in the myriad possibilities of signification which can only
be cultivated by analogical thinking. If “the hallmark of contemporary
experience is an absence of in-betweenness,” as Barbara Maria Stafford
admits (1999:10), then the identification and elaboration of analogical
systems becomes a redemptive practice capable of navigating a productive
course through fixed, reductive, and authoritarian (either/or) versions of
understanding.
Ronald Schleifer, a professor of English and medicine, skillfully
traces the development of analogical thinking in the modern and
postmodern eras, claiming that the turn of the twentieth century gave rise to
a period of invention, a “post-Enlightenment” era which supplanted
inherited values of the Enlightenment, notably those “modes of
representation that take reduction and hierarchy to be the ‘methods’ of
science and wisdom” (2000:1). Standing in marked contrast to this mode of
thought—epitomized and inaugurated by Descartes’ “clear and distinct
ideas”—analogical thinking
9
is not reductive, or at least not reductive once and for all.Instead, it presents momentary or emergent insights by notingsimilarities, rather than identities, that suggest trajectories topursue rather than resting places to inhabit. […] Analogies donot present or assert positive entities, invariants, essences.Instead, they offer insight and frameworks of understandingborn of relationships that can always be apprehended asprovisional, the source of beginning rather than ending.(2000:24)
The exceptional characteristic of analogy is that the constituent analogues
“retain their individual intensity while being focused, interpreted, and
related to other distinctive analogues” (Stafford 1999:9). In doing so, the
analogical system maintains a complex, multivalent structure which allows
for shifts, overlays, tension, and depth—in short, those “frameworks of
understanding” which encourage inventive and productive interpretations.
10
An Architecture of Memory (13th Room)
11
+ middles: territories of meaning
Analogy gathers together scattered factors and, to one degreeor another, judges the importance of its gathering. Suchjudgments, however, are provisional: they take place outsidethe imperative of choosing once and for all. That is,analogical knowledge, like narrative itself, suspends the lawof the excluded middle. Instead, it offers versions ofcomprehension—configurations, analogies, wholes that donot erase parts—that can, in fact, be superimposed upon oneanother precisely to create "middles." (Schleifer 2000:15)
The semantic core of the analogical system resides at the conceptual
intersection of the individual parts of the analogy, that zone created by the
superimposition and superposition of essentially translucent entities. The
active light of interpretation shines through these layers, as it were,
illuminating significant shapes and figures. Meaning actively happens here;
it is constructed as images overlap each other, aligning themselves
momentarily, then shifting slightly, encouraging reevaluation and
reinterpretation. As a layered figure of depth in architecture, complexity
occurs in both plan and section. As a site, the zone of meaning in the
analogical system is often ambiguous, never a statement of “once and for all”
(2000:24) nor a mandate issued from some authorial power—there is space
and freedom, room for “play.” Yet, also as a site, this area has boundaries,
12
Fig. 2. Superimposition and superposition in an analogical system.Paintings and digital manipulation by the author.
13
or, rather, a set (largely unquantifiable) of all available meanings, which is
different than a boundless field of all-inclusiveness or unregulated
interpretations.
Although not referring specifically to analogy, the French designer
and theorist, Bernard Cache, offers a fascinating and complicated (and
refreshingly non-linguistic) model of an in-between space where significant
meaning arises from the rich interaction of vectors, inflections, and frames (see
also Deleuze 1993:15, 19). A frame is any number of “geometrical figures of
identity”—which is to say that a frame is basically any perceivable form: in
the words of Focillon, any “construction of space and matter” (1948:2). While
possessing some rigidity, the frame, however, is a variable structure which is
never autonomous from its substantive “skin”: “The rigid parts of the frame
still retain a certain geometry, but their articulation is mobile and their
equilibrium results from the play of tensions that run through the system as
a whole” (Cache 1995:108). A vector—evident in the frame—represents a
directional thrust, a selection made at a given instant. For Cache, the vector
is able to express numerous values, in effect existing as a kind of historical
document which does not necessitate a hierarchical organization but instead
merely demonstrates a quality in and of itself. The vector, having direction
and magnitude, is both an abstraction as well as a concrete figure.
The identification with mathematics is obvious here and becomes
even more entrenched (and technical) in the concept of inflection, that image
which suggests a moment of choice and possibility—literally, the change in
curvature from concave to convex. According to Cache, on any given curve
14
Fig. 3. Points of inflection.
there are the “extrema”—the maximum and minimum points which are
singular only in relation to the entire vector—and in-between these are
points
of inflection, “intrinsic singularities” which exist independent of the vector
(1995:16-17). Expanding this mathematical figure, imagine the maximum
and minimum points as those images which are most readily perceptible in
the world: the peaks of mountain tops, the edges of lakes, the most popular
movie, the worst team in the league, “the best possible images.”5
Conversely, inflection
5 By image, Cache means “anything that presents itself to the mind” (1995:3).His sense of this term is greatly influenced by the writing of Henri Bergson,especially Matter and Memory (1911).
15
is the mark of images that can’t be the best, and that are thusoutside the world and its inclines, though they are a part of it.Take any surface. Generally, we describe its relief in terms ofsummits and crests, basins and valleys. But if we can manageto erase our coordinate axes, then we will only see inflections,or other intrinsic singularities that describe the surfaceprecisely. They are the sign that the best possible are notgiven, and that the best are not even called forth. (1995:36)
This is the territory of meaning. And Cache’s understanding of the
in-between, that subtle, fleeting glimpse of the point of inflection, points
directly to the essential, operative potential of the analogical system: the
opportunity to discover in the “middles” an abundance of significant
meaning, rich and dense, multivalent and ambiguous. “[I]nflection
represents a totality of possibilities, as well as an openness, a receptiveness,
or an anticipation” (1995:17).
16
An Architecture of Memory (49th Room)
17
+ tacit knowing and material practice
The “middles” which arise in the analogical system become the site
of meaning building. Here, practice and production culminate (but never
“once and for all”) in a moment of ineffable clarity; and this moment of grace
is inherently tacit rather than patent. Tacit knowledge is that which is
understood or implied without being stated; it depends upon visceral
experience, learning by participation, and a whole set of “unconscious
factors that are culturally as well as biologically filtered and influenced”
(Berman 1981:348). Conversely, patent knowledge is obvious, easily
recognizable, articulated and mediated by figuration.
Morris Berman, in The Reenchantment of the World, provides a telling
example of tacit knowing. Borrowing an anecdote from Michael Polanyi, he
relates the experience of medical students learning to identify pathologies in
x-rays, a skill which cannot be taught categorically with a list of instructions
or a set of procedural guidelines. They learn by observing senior doctors
over a period of several months, by watching the more practiced
professionals as they discern what each miniscule blur or hairline or speck in
the image discloses about the patient. The x-rays and their identifying
marks cease to be figurations of disease—that is, signs which must be
contemplated and then translated into significance—instead becoming
somewhat transparent; the student eventually just “sees” disease without
18
deliberately and rationally contemplating its sign (1981:138-141; see Shiff
1996:323-28 for an insightful essay on figuration).
Polanyi, a scientist-turned-philosopher who spent the better part of
his career developing a theory of personal knowledge based on the principle
of tacit knowing, conceived of tacit knowing as a relation involving two
terms: the proximal and the distal—where the proximal is the totality of the
particulars in the tacit relation and the distal is the comprehensive meaning
of that relation. In apprehending the meaning of an entity, we “attend from”
the proximal (particulars) to the distal (meaning); and it is the proximal of
which we have a tacit knowledge without being able to articulate it (1966:10).
Borrowed from the field of anatomy, the terms are appropriate considering
Polanyi’s privileging of the body as “the ultimate instrument of all our
external knowledge, whether intellectual or practical” (1966:15). The body
—“which we normally never experience as an object, but experience always
in terms of the world to which we are attending from our body” (1966:16)—
is the medium of tacit knowing, and it is through “indwelling”,
incorporating the particulars into our body via proximity and extension, that
we truly understand the relational work of the proximal and distal:
We shall presently see that to attend from a thing to itsmeaning is to interiorize it, and that to look instead at the thingis to exteriorize or alienate it. We shall then say that we endow athing with meaning by interiorizing it and destroy its meaning byalienating it. (1969:146)
19
Polanyi accepts the theory of gestalt as a particular model of tacit
knowing: in visual perception we attend from a number of particulars
(sensations given by vision, by the body) to their meaning as a whole, which
is the perception. Taken individually, the proximal elements are
meaningless until they are attended to at a certain distance, being the distal
(Polanyi refers to this process as “transposition”) (1969:146). If we consider
again the example of medical students learning to “read” disease in x-rays,
this conception of tacit knowing may become clearer. The tacit relation
consists of the marks on the x-rays (proximal) and the meaning of the marks
(distal) which is either normal or pathological. And the students, while
never able to articulate the proximal, over time come to associate (attend
from) certain combinations of marks and blemishes and spots with a
comprehensive meaning (distal) which is the presence of disease. “Let us
recognize that tacit knowing is the fundamental power of the mind, which
creates explicit knowing, lends meaning to it and controls its use” (1969:156).
Meaning building—the compound activity of perceiving, learning,
inventing—describes a process by which meaning and significance are
generated via tacit knowing. In Vision and Painting, Norman Bryson uses the
tacit operation as one of the key components in his analysis of painting, a
work which also offers a strong critique of previous methodologies of art
historical analysis (1983). Reaching far back into the annals of time, his
investigation begins with Pliny’s account of Zeuxis and his rival painters,
one of whom is so skilled in the art of trompe l’oeil that he in fact deceives
the great Zeuxis, who mistakes a painted image of a curtain for the real
thing. This, of course, has been the dominant discourse regarding
20
representation in the western world—a “natural attitude” which has as its
logical culmination an “Essential Copy” of reality in the image (see 1983:1-
32). Bryson tells us that this attitude within the field of art history has
changed very little, making only slight modifications by introducing
historical relativism; that is, the “Essential Copy” is still the desirable aim
but it is relativized and specific to particular epochs and social periods.
Ernst Gombrich, in the 20th century, is the first to suggest a challenge
to this notion of the painter as a naïve and innocent instrument of the
faithful representation of the real. Working within the milieu of the
philosophy of science, Gombrich posits that the painter during any given
epoch inherits a set of representational schemata which influence how he
depicts his world. Therefore, the challenge to the artist is to test these
schemata against his own experimental observations of nature, thus
augmenting the representational schemata and moving it ever closer to a
more accurate version of reality. Of course, perceptualism (as this theory is
called) still arrives at the same intellectual impasse: the “doctrine of mimesis”
which necessitates “a description of representation as a process of perceptual
correspondence where the image is said to match… with varying degrees of
success, a fully established and anterior reality” (1983:38). Bryson remedies
the rigidity and social isolation of formalism with the assertion of the
painting as sign, as the site of cultural production, as material practice, where
“the real ought to be understood not as a transcendent and immutable given,
but as a production brought about by human activity working within
specific cultural constraints” (1983:5). As an area of inquiry, material
practice encompasses not only the work of the painter, but also the work of
21
the viewer: both are involved in tacit operations, “improvisations-within-
context” which yield significance by way of meaningful engagement and
interaction with practical and tangible work—much like the medical
students learning to read x-rays. In the territory of meaning—the “middles”
of the analogical system—material practice catalyzes the process of meaning
building as we begin to explore that in-between zone.
22
An Architecture of Memory (21st Room)
23
+ selected buildings by Aldo Rossi
24
Fig. 4. Top: Aldo Rossi, Monument and town square, Segrate, 1965. Photoby the author.
Fig. 5. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Friedrichstaadt Housing block, Berlin, 1981-88.Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Architect, 195.
25
Fig. 6 & 7. Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese housing block, Milan, 1969-70. Top: Photoby the author. Bottom: Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: The Life andWorks of An Architect, 49.
26
Fig. 8 & 9. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo cemetery, Modena, 1971-78. Photos bythe author.
27
Fig. 10 & 11. Aldo Rossi, San Cataldo cemetery, Modena, 1971-78. Photos bythe author.
28
Fig. 12 & 13. Aldo Rossi, Fontivegge commercial district, Perugia, 1982.Photos by the author.
29
Fig. 14. Top: Aldo Rossi, Town hall, Borgoricco, 1983. Reprinted from AldoRossi, Aldo Rossi: Architect, 119.
30
Fig. 15. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, New building for the Bonnefantenmuseum,Maastricht, 1990. Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: The Life and Worksof An Architect, 273.
31
Fig. 16. Top: Aldo Rossi, Contemporary art center, Vassivière, 1988.Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Architect, 148.
Fig. 17. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Teatro del Mondo, Venice, 1979. Reprintedfrom Aldo Rossi: The Life and Works of An Architect, 88.
32
An Architecture of Memory (22nd Room)
33
+ from The Architecture of the City to A Scientific Autobiography
Let us consider the scope and evolution of Aldo Rossi’s projects,
drawings, and writings by selecting two obvious textual “moments” in his
career which provide opportunities to mark and assess his creative and
intellectual development: The Architecture of the City, first published in 1966,
and A Scientific Autobiography, of 1981. These markers are useful in sketching
the prevalent themes and motives—constant, yet at times shifting focus—
which became the theoretical foundation of a life’s work. As a skilled and
practiced writer (says Rossi: “My education was basically a literary one…”
[Rossi 1994:15]), Rossi set forth his theories in several published articles,
essays, books, reflections, and project descriptions; and these present to us
unequivocal evidence (nearly) of the worth of his evolving
architectural/critical vocabulary—“typology,” “history,” “memory,” the
“analogical,” “the city,” “rationalism,” to mention the most outstanding.
Perhaps more relevant to this project, though, these writings reveal Rossi’s
changing attitude towards his thesis and its expression in his creative
practice.
In The Architecture of the City Rossi formulates a theory of typology in
architectural design and urban design based upon a rigorous study of the
history of the Western city (Berlin and Rome are prime examples) which is
supported by references to diverse sources borrowed from the fields of
34
geography, urban ecology, and collective psychology.6 As an impressive
scholarly work, The Architecture of the City clinically catalogues and codifies
Rossi’s interest in the city-as-architecture based on his study of rationalism
and typology in architecture, thus laying the groundwork for a thesis which
will inform all of his subsequent creative work. The “precise meaning” of
this theory of design is concisely stated in the introduction to the second
Italian edition of the book:
…to consider the city as architecture means to recognize theimportance of architecture as a discipline that has a self-determined autonomy (and this is not autonomous in anabstract sense), constitutes a major urban artifact within thecity, and, through all the processes analyzed in this book,links the past to the present. (1982:165)
An understanding of architecture that stresses its “self-determined
autonomy” is bound to an iteration of a typology of architecture. The
problem of type is extremely important to Rossi’s theory of autonomy
because building types are elemental in determining the form of
architecture, and they are not dependent upon—that is, not causally related
to—a specific, fixed function. In this way, Rossi repeatedly refers to the
Palazzo della Ragione in Padua as an example of a building which is a model
of a particular type (the palazzo) but hosts a multiplicity of functions (it is
now a commercial marketplace). In fact, Rossi’s iteration of type constitutes
6 Rafael Moneo’s early article on Rossi, which appeared in Oppositions andwas probably America’s first introduction to Rossi’s work, begins with anexcellent and concise analysis of The Architecture of the City (1976).
35
a new typology of architecture, one which Anthony Vidler has identified as
the “third” typology in an essay from 1977 (1978).7 This “third” typology
posits the city itself as the foundation of architectural types in defiance of the
previous typologies derived from nature and the machine.
The first typology is exemplified by Laugier’s allegorical image of the
primitive hut: primitive man, seeking shelter, “discovers” the form of the
rustic hut in the trunks of trees (columns), the boughs (lintels), and the
canopy of branches (roof, thus pediment). Implicit in this conception is the
fundamental order of Nature allied with the perfect geometry of platonic
forms. Vidler maintains that this emphasis on the natural origins of
architecture led to an interest in the classification of types in architecture
(analogous and contemporaneous to efforts to classify various species within
the animal kingdom), and each individual building became recognizable as
belonging to a particular “species” of buildings. A contemporary of Laugier,
J. N. L. Durand, wrested this notion of typology away from its organic
origins in order to establish the natural history of architecture as dependent
on its own history apart from the history of Nature. In this way, architecture
is primarily a matter of construction, and Durand formulated “the basic
elements of construction, according to the inductively derived rules of
composition for the taxonomy of different building types resulting in endless
combinations and permutations,” a method which also accommodated the
invention of new building types (Vidler 1978:29).
7 See also Vidler’s article “The Idea of Type: The Transformation of theAcademic Ideal, 1750-1830” (1977) for lengthier history of type andarchitectural theory.
36
At the end of the 19th century, as the onslaught of the final decades of
the Industrial Revolution prepared the way for the mass production of
machines by machines, the second typology arrived, thus counting
architecture as one of many in a range of mass-produced objects. In the
hands of modernists like Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, “buildings were
to be no more and no less than machines themselves, serving and molding
the needs of man according to economic criteria” (Vidler 1978:30). Rossi
describes this kind of causal relationship between social conditions and the
formal aspects of architecture (the effect) as “naïve functionalism”, a
consequence of the modern movement of which Rossi (and the third
typology) is explicitly critical. The force of this critique resides in the
exultation of architectural form as the only object of study because form—
architecture as construction—is continuous throughout time and therefore
indexically registers its own history; whereas function or social mores
change according to forces independent of architectural form, and cannot,
then, serve as a rule for understanding architecture. Summarizing the
importance of an autonomous architecture for Rossi, Rafael Moneo captures
the essential program of The Architecture of the City:
Research in architecture thus leads to the study of the specificaspects of architecture which allow it to be understood as anautonomous discipline… a discipline that cannot beunderstood exclusively through external parameters butwhich can be established through appropriate formal rules.Through the idea of autonomy, necessary to theunderstanding of the form of the city, architecture becomes acategory of reality. (1976:4)
37
Rossi seems to have cultivated his interest in “research in
architecture” through his study of Etienne Boullée (a study which led him to
translate Boullée’s Architecture, essai sur l’art into Italian and write an
introduction to that text) and the brand of rationalism which this
Enlightenment figure represented. According to Rossi, “Boullée was a
rationalist because he applied a logical system to architecture [and] was
committed to constantly verifying the presuppositions in his various
projects, and a design’s rationale had to relate to this system of logic”
(1989:41). Alan Colquhoun has traced the evolution of rationalism as a
philosophical concept in architecture (it is interesting that he does not
include Boullée in that history), placing Rossi as one of the architects at the
end of that trajectory. Rationalism has meant different things to different
historical periods, and Colquhoun speculates that this ambiguity may have
prompted Rossi to ally himself with the term (1975:365). Either way, the
rationalism of the young Italian architects of the mid-1960s with whom Rossi
was affiliated was based upon a “new formalism”—distinct from the
formalism of modernism—which saw “the invariant elements of architecture
as irreducible beyond the experience of architecture itself, as a social and
cultural reality”, thus capable of describing the history of architecture as “a
continuous instant in which thought and memory are coextensive”
(Colquhoun 1989:84).
By privileging the experience of architecture, Rossi is really
advocating a case by case understanding of the architecture of the city via an
empiricism which, by definition, must focus on individual and singular man-
38
made objects simply because the experience of the city is bound by
inevitable physical parameters. The city is an artifact comprised of other
urban artifacts, each with its own individual locus within the city, each a
singular constructed element, each the site of a succession of events.
Subsequently, referencing such thinkers as Lewis Mumford and Claude
Lévi-Strauss, Rossi postulates that the urban artifact may be studied as a
work of art, as a man-made thing par excellence born of the unconscious.
A conception of architecture as a man-made urban artifact and as an
autonomous discipline which exhibits a unique, self-referential history (the
third typology) come together with the permanence of type to stress the
continuity of the city through time, the link between the past and the
present. “The city is in its history,” writes Rossi;
…it is an event and a form. Thus the union between the pastand the future exists in the very idea of the city that it flowsthrough in the same way that memory flows through the lifeof a person; and always, in order to be realized, this idea mustnot only shape but be shaped by reality. (1982:32, 131)
Although he rather simplistically equates history with the collective memory
of a city based on his reading of Maurice Halbwachs, it is important to
distinguish the nature of this history—one which is conveyed through
(urban) artifacts, revealed in form—from an entirely authoritative History
which acts as the official document of a particular culture or society. While
the evolution, constructions, and destructions of the city do depend upon the
decisions made by those in power, the people who use the city do much to
39
influence this largely unwritten history. The city as collective memory “does
not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners
of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the
antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked
in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls” (Calvino 1974:11).
The Architecture of the City, then, advocates a rational study of the
form of the city—the residential areas (the quartier), primary elements and
monuments, the persistence of the plan through time. The belief is that this
analytical method will provide an enlightened understanding of the city as a
whole comprised of many fragments and will inform the design of new
structures for the city (and Rossi claims that this process is applicable to
cities both old and new). In other words,
the design phase of new urban features consists in a reversalof the techniques of analysis and a reapplication of theprinciples discovered in the formal and spatial data of existingcities. In practice, this requires exhaustive studies of thesuccessive layers of urban change, as well as a detailedcomparison of the various building types that characterize aparticular locality. (Stewart 1976:111)
With this very laborious and elliptical text, Rossi emulates the role of
architect-scholar, or architect-scientist, which is in keeping with his
admiration of the rationalism of Boullée, and employs the scientific method
as a way to counteract the “sins” of the modernist “fathers”. These “sins”
Colquhoun has exposed as part and parcel of the paradoxical doctrine of the
Modern Movement, a strange mixture of the “biotechnical determinism” of
40
functionalism and “a mystical belief in the intuitional process” of design
(Colquhoun 1996:254). The Architecture of the City is Rossi’s attempt to give
logical expression to a return to architecture as architecture.
Sixteen years later we read Rossi reflecting on his intentions in The
Architecture of the City, reflecting, that is, on his unwillingness or inability to
discern the emotional essence of his interests in architecture and the city:
At that time, I was not yet thirty years old, and as I have said,I wanted to write a definitive work: it seemed to me thateverything, once clarified, could be defined. I believed thatthe Renaissance treatise had to become an apparatus whichcould be translated into objects. I scorned memories, and atthe same time, I made use of urban impressions: behindfeelings I searched for the fixed laws of a timeless typology. Isaw courts and galleries, the elements of urban morphology,distributed in the city with the purity of mineralogy. I readbooks on urban geography, topography, and history, like ageneral who wishes to know every possible battlefield—thehigh grounds, the passages, the woods. I walked the cities ofEurope to understand their plans and classify them accordingto types. Like a lover sustained by my egotism, I oftenignored the secret feelings I had for those cities; it was enoughto know the system that governed them. Perhaps I simplywanted to free myself of the city. Actually, I was discoveringmy own architecture. (Rossi 1981:15-16)
This passage from the first pages of A Scientific Autobiography explains his
obstinacy in the early text, but its tone also exemplifies the timbre of Rossi’s
creative work as it reached maturation in the years after publishing that 1966
41
“treatise”. Now, it is the poetic, rather than—as the title of the
autobiography suggests—the scientific which guides his projects and
writing. Having once “scorned” memory, he embraces those “secret
feelings” as the dominant theme of his entire oeuvre, indeed “exchanging
‘History’ for ‘Memory’” (Vogt 1983:87). In A Scientific Autobiography Rossi
has not necessarily abandoned the investigations and conclusions of The
Architecture of the City, with all of its complicated subordinate concepts, but
he seems to reveal the underlying motivations for these initial theories,
motivations which are deeply personal and connected to profound
memories of images from his childhood and developmental years. Rossi is
stripping away the self-conscious scholarship of The Architecture of the City
and developing an autobiographical narrative about the importance of
observation, repetition, type, and the singularity of experience in his projects
—which really is to say the importance of memory. Writing with an
eloquent melancholy which somehow never quite degenerates into
pathological nostalgia, he seems a man obsessed with the memory of a
handful of specific places and things from his native north Italy: the statue of
Il Carlone, the chapels of the Sacri Monti, Filarete’s column in Venice, the
anatomical theater in Parma. Yet, in spite of, and because of, this insistent
longing and cyclical cataloging of memories, A Scientific Autobiography is
characterized by a persistence, a relentless or mechanistic need to keep
going, and this momentum propels Rossi forward into the future through a
kind of historical endurance.
42
…Rossi repeats a scheme that he has already experimentedwith, displaying his work as the result of the final screening ofthe progressive depositing of “residues” of different types justas, in Rossi’s special cultural world, the city is the form of awhole made up of parts, of differences, and above all of asedimentation of the forms and types that endure the attritionof history. (Dal Co 1979:69).
That taxonomical interest in typology which is so fundamental in The
Architecture of the City finds a fully poetic expression in A Scientific
Autobiography. For Rossi and his colleagues of the 1960s, the resurgent
interest in architectural types provided a way to mend the rupture with the
past for which the modernists had been responsible. If modernists stripped
their architectural forms of any recognizable associations with the history of
architecture in order to capture l’esprit nouveau, then Rossi’s (and others’)
attention to type cleared a path towards rejoining the continuity of the
history of architecture by “rewriting” the city as an evolving formal
structure of architectural signs which “re-present the past through their
strategies of writing” (Boyer 1994:188). M. Christine Boyer notes Rossi’s
gradual modification of his initial theories of the city—which were probably
constrained by their reliance on a model of structural linguistics—so posing
the question: “As every city carries within it the landscape and architectural
remains of other cities, and as a memory image is a fragment of a deep-
seated notion or an archetype, might the irrational call and untranslatable
message of archaic symbols be utilized to disrupt the linear codes and
rational conventions of language?” (1994:189). By placing more emphasis on
43
this kind of “memory image”, Rossi allows his conception of typology to
become more overtly poetic and autobiographical:
I am referring rather to familiar objects, whose form andposition are already fixed, but whose meanings may bechanged. Barns, stables, sheds, workshops, etc. Archetypalobjects whose common emotional appeal reveals timelessconcerns. Such objects are situated between inventory andmemory. Regarding the question of memory, architecture isalso transformed into autobiographical experience; places andthings change with the superimposition of new meanings.(Rossi 1976:74)
By the time Rossi compiles A Scientific Autobiography he has already
entrenched himself “between inventory and memory”. In pursuit of an
architecture which can be “transformed into autobiographical experience”
and which accepts “the superimposition of new meanings”, his exhaustive
search for those meaningful moments in his life leads him to exchange a
typology of architecture with a typology of the memory of architecture. It is a
subtle transposition which is no great conceptual stretch because an
explanation of the process of memory depends upon a complex coordination
of generic and episodic representations of the past. This description of the
structure of memory is analogically related to Quatremère de Quincy’s
notion of type and model in architecture, the definition of typology to which
Rossi subscribes.8 The elaboration, repetition, and recombination of a few
8 Quatremère de Quincy’s definition of type, as quoted by Rossi: “The word‘type’ represents not so much the image of a thing to be copied or perfectlyimitated as the idea of an element that must itself serve as a rule for themodel… The model, understood in terms of the practical execution of art, is
44
memorable architectural forms is the foundation of Aldo Rossi’s modus
operandi, whether in drawing and painting, the buildings, or the writing in
A Scientific Autobiography.
an object that must repeated such as it is; type, on the contrary, is an objectaccording to which once can conceive works that do not resemble oneanother at all. Everything is precise and given in the model; everything ismore or less vague in the type. Thus we see that the limitation of typesinvolves nothing that feelings or spirit cannot recognize…” (Rossi 1982:40).
45
An Architecture of Memory (40th Room)
46
+ active memory
Within the fields of both cognitive psychology and philosophy, the
literature regarding most aspects of memory is vast. A historiography of this
corpus would reveal (like the historiography of any field) dominant and
subordinate theories whose promotion and acceptance depends upon a
range of epistemological inheritances and research methodologies,
professional rivalries, and technological innovations, to name a few factors
(see Brewer 1995). In the face of such a large quantity of research and
writing, my inquiry into some cognitive theories of memory was guided by a
need for an understanding of memory more directly relevant to the heart of
this project: namely, the role of memory in the work and process of Aldo
Rossi. A schema-based theory of memory appears to me as most
appropriate.9 Modern schema theory is best defined as one which holds
that the mind employs “generic knowledge structures that guide the
comprehender’s interpretations, inferences, expectations, and attention”
(Graesser and Nakamura 1982:60). These are high-order, unconscious
structures: “high-order” because schemas are primary means of organizing
knowledge, and “unconscious” in that they are deeply embedded into our
cognition of the world. Frederick C. Bartlett (1886-1969) is hailed as the
9 I owe my introduction to this particular body of research on memory toRemembrance and the Design of Place by Francis Downey (2000).
47
forefather of contemporary schema theory as published in Remembering
(1932). Bartlett questioned the popular trace theory account of memory
which held that memory is episodic, such that specific, actual “traces” of past
experience our stored directly for later recall. For Bartlett, memory is a
dynamic process:
Remembering is not the re-excitation of innumerable fixed,lifeless and fragmentary traces. It is an imaginativereconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of ourattitude towards a whole active mass of organized pastreactions or experience, and to a little outstanding detailwhich commonly appears in image or in language form. It isthus hardly ever really exact, even in the most rudimentarycases of rote recapitulation, and it is not at all important that itshould be so. (1932:213)
Brewer and Nakamura (1984:125-6) find that Bartlett actually proposed two
slightly different versions of the theory in Remembering: the “official” view,
known as pure reconstructive recall (absolutely no specific episodic
representation of new information is retained in memory) and the
“unofficial” view, as evident in his actual data, of partial reconstructive
recall (recall as a joint function of a schema component and a specific
episodic component). It is the latter which has been embraced by the
majority of cognitive psychologists working with schema theory and
memory today.
In modern schema theory, there are five operations in which schemas
specifically affect memory (Brewer and Nakamura 1984:143-52): attention,
framework, integration, retrieval, and editing.
48
Attention Schemas influence what objects and events are encoded
into memory by directing an individual’s attention towards either
schema-relevant or schema-irrelevant material, such that high degrees
of attention lead to better recall.
Framework Schemas act as frameworks for episodic information, such
that the framework accepts a range of possible values regarding
information relevant to the schema.
Integration Schema-based information is integrated with episodic
information at the instance of input, such that the memory will contain
both generic and episodic information in varying degrees dependent
upon the type of schema and the time interval between input and
recall.
Retrieval Schemas facilitate retrieval, guiding recall for schema-
relevant information.
Editing Schemas, working apart from the process of memory,
influence what is communicated about the specific memory.
Let us consider the schema theory of memory in terms of a real
scenario: a trip to a baseball game. Having been both a player and spectator
of baseball, I possess a rich set of schema and sub-schema for “baseball
game” which organizes and influences my knowledge and memories of
baseball games. It will also influence my experience of future baseball
games. Each baseball game I have attended is integrated into this baseball
schema so that I have generic knowledge about baseball games which
includes information like the structure and rules of the game, the sensual
qualities of the baseball field and stadium, the various activities and rituals
49
of the spectators and players, etc. There are also a number of sub-schema,
such as the experience of eating a ballpark hotdog and using the stadium’s
public restroom. According to schema theory, when I remember a particular
baseball game many of the so-called episodic details of that experience may
in fact be incorrectly inserted simply because I have certain expectations
about my experience of baseball games based upon my schematic
knowledge of them. Likewise, there may be omissions of those details which
were too incompatible (and also, too insignificant) with my “baseball game”
schema. The schema for attending a baseball game is constructed by these
experiences and changed by them, altered or reinforced as new information
is integrated.
Any consideration of memory, then, must address the question of
whether or not the process of remembering leads to accurate, veridical
representations of the past. In fact, accurate or not, we do strongly believe
that our memories are not only our own but are true, which may be in part
due to the high level of detail of the imagery that accompanies our memories
(Rubin 1995:4-5). Of course, except in extreme cases of mis-information
leading to harmful false memories (see Belli and Loftus 1995), some
discrepancy between what really occurred and what I believe to have occurred is
probably not so devastating to the sense of identity which our
autobiographical memories assist in constructing. In characterizing the
interconnectedness between individual (autobiographical) memory and the
collective memory of a particular social or cultural group, Maurice
Halbwachs noticed that we depend upon those around us to corroborate our
50
individual memories, and thus work together to build each individual’s
“collective memory” of the group to which we belong (1980:22-3).
The implications of this are that alienation from a group may lead to
a forgetting or at least an uncertainty about the accuracy of one’s individual
memory, a more tentative relationship to memory which is possibly
pathological. We may also wonder if, at any point, the memory of the group
—and its power of corroboration, of persuasive suggestion—actually
supercedes the memories of the individual, thus corrupting the very
personal and organic relationship between memory and the sense of self.
Especially in our own time, we are inundated by the Image, that hyperactive
stream of constructed visibility which leaves no time for contemplation. As
Walter Benjamin, quoting Duhamel, wrote: “I can no longer think what I
want to think. My thoughts have been replaced by moving images”
(1968:238). Are we then faced with “a memory crisis of too many images,
too phantasmagorical, too commodified, that inhibit the recall and
recollection of images stored in the mind” (Boyer 1994:27)?10
Boyer also tells us, in The City of Collective Memory, that the other
aspect of the memory crisis concerns a rejection of a unified collective
memory as the acceptable transmission of “our” story as a society and a
culture. In the midst of the projects of modernism and postmodernism, the
desire to establish “counter-memories” reflects this distrust as well as the
10 Not everyone admits this “crisis of memory.” Marita Sturken, for example,claims that cultural memory in the modern and postmodern eras, rather thanbe lamented as corrupted or pathological, must be understood as a“changeable script” which abandons wholeness in favor of “culturalreenactment” as means to emotional and psychological healing (1997:19).
51
urge to break with convention, with received notions of the way things are.
Benjamin perceived a similar dilemma in his own time, noting that narrative
and story—essential elements in an healthy relationship to memory and
history—were being replaced by fragmented, disconnected images, the
“shock experiences” of the modern metropolis whose symptoms were
disorientation and disengagement. Benjamin’s antidote to this dream state
was to use familiar, memory-laden artifacts as “shock experiences”
themselves which might enable the spectator “to think through dream
images and to achieve a critical awareness of the present” (Boyer 1994:23-9).
In attempting to understand the power which memory exerts in our
everyday lives—lives full of mundane details and extraordinary moments, of
loss and discovery—we have the opportunity to probe an elaborate structure
of meaning which so often brings together apparently unrelated,
anachronistic, and fractured events, concepts, and images. Our memories
are absolutely significant to who we are as individuals, as well as our sense
of ourselves and personal identity (in effect, constituting our personal lore,
our autobiography). In this way, we may make a distinction between the
effulgent mass of visual culture and the equally bright and complex strata of
individual memories, as Baudelaire did:
An important difference exists between the palimpsestmanuscript that superposes, one upon the other, a Greektragedy, a monastic legend, and a chivalric tale, and thedivine palimpsest created by God, which is ourincommensurable memory: in the first there is something likea fantastic, grotesque randomness, a collision betweenheterogeneous elements; whereas in the second (memory) the
52
inevitability of temperament necessarily establishes aharmony among the most disparate elements. Howeverincoherent a given existence may be, its human unity is notupset. All the echoes of memory, if one could awaken themsimultaneously, would form a concert—pleasant or painful,but logical and without dissonance. (Quoted in Boyer1994:479)
Within the context of contemporary visual culture, the sheer excess of
constructed images, their relentless production and transmission (the
“palimpsest manuscript”), tends to decrease the acuity of our understanding
to the visual world—that is, our desire to scrutinize the vast field of images
in the world. The content of memory presents a similar stream of images to
the mind, yet this montage refers directly (we hope) to our uniqueness as
individuals, existing as a collection of lived experiences, relationships,
abilities, perceptions, ideas. Memory is the territory of meaning; it is the
fundamental process by which we establish our relationship with the world.
53
An Architecture of Memory (25th Room)
54
+ selected drawings by Aldo Rossi
55
Fig. 18 & 19. Top: Aldo Rossi, Architecture, 1972. Reprinted from VittorioSavi, L’architectura di Aldo Rossi (Milan, 1985), 87. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, UrbanComposition with Monument, 1973. Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi:Projects and drawings 1962-1979 (New York, 1979), 154.
56
Fig. 20-23. Top left: Aldo Rossi, Study for a Monument to the Resistance, 1970.Reprinted from Vittorio Savi, L’architectura di Aldo Rossi, 49. Top right: AldoRossi, The Hand of the Saint, 1976. Reprinted from Vittorio Savi, L’architecturadi Aldo Rossi, 88. Bottom left: Aldo Rossi, Composition with S. Carlo – cities andmonuments, 1970. Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Drawings andPaintings, 95. Bottom right: Aldo Rossi, Composition with Bridge, 1970.Reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Projects and drawings 1962-1979, 15.
57
Fig. 24-27. Top left: Aldo Rossi, Untitled, 1981. Top right: Aldo Rossi,Untitled, 1993. Bottom left: Aldo Rossi, Untitled (Casa Bay), 1975. Bottomright: Aldo Rossi, Gauloises caporal, 1971. All reprinted from Aldo Rossi, AldoRossi: Drawings and Paintings, 105, 8, 119, 106.
58
Fig. 28-30. Top left: Aldo Rossi, L’architecture assassinée, 1974. Top right:Aldo Rossi, Il Teatro del Mondo, 1987. Bottom: Aldo Rossi, Dieses ist lange her– ora é questo perduto, 1975. All reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi:Drawings and Paintings, 64, 150, 171.
59
Fig. 31-33. Top right: Aldo Rossi, The Hand of the Saint, 1973. Top left: AldoRossi, Architettura razionale e immagini celesti, 1974. Bottom: Aldo Rossi,Untitled, 1984. All reprinted from Aldo Rossi, Aldo Rossi: Drawings andPaintings, 90, 93, 40.
60
An Architecture of Memory (6th Room)
61
+ Aldo Rossi and meaning building
In order to be significant, architecture must be forgotten, ormust present only an image for reference which subsequentlybecomes confounded with memories. (Rossi 1981:45)
Recall that elsewhere in this thesis we have invoked a method of
inquiry that promotes analogical thinking. In other words, by considering
Aldo Rossi’s creative process as an analogical system comprised of
individual components—his buildings, drawings, writings—we are
engaging a way of thinking about his work which is “not reductive” but
(hopefully) “presents momentary or emergent insights” and uncovers
“frameworks of understanding” (Schleifer 2000:24). This methodology
would be entirely appropriate to the study of Aldo Rossi if such attempts at
understanding his meaning are of the subject rather than about it. As early as
his introduction to the second Italian edition of The Architecture of the City,
Rossi had begun to articulate the idea of the “analogous city”, an analogy in
and of itself that asserted that the relationships between different
architectural types and forms could be manipulated in order to induce new
meanings in those spaces, in the architecture of city. In subsequent years, as
his writings and projects were infused more with the narrative of his
autobiography, analogical thinking became fundamental to his poetic
62
process: through the activity of remembering and repetition he filtered a
longtime interest in the typology of specific architectural forms.
Yet, Rossi’s poetic was not as self-absorbed as it may seem—or, at
least, it was not ultimately meant to turn in on itself in the creation of a
restrictive reverie. He expected his obsession with memory to translate into
his buildings in such a way that it would invigorate architecture with a new
liberty, a freedom of experience and meaning similar to so many of those
buildings he had discovered and cited in The Architecture of the City: the
Palazzo della Ragione in Padua, the Roman amphitheater-turned-market
square in Lucca, the tiny fishing huts along the Po River valley—buildings
that, while displaying characteristics of specific types, transcended the
program of those types by accommodating changing activities and uses. By
analogically relating the transposition of architectural types with the process
of memory, Rossi was privileging meaning building with his architecture as
an integral part of the built environment, especially as it governed the
evolution of cities. Indebted to an understanding of meaning borrowed from
linguistics, he would have appreciated the “critical animism of signs”
proposed by Charles Pierce: “[E]very symbol...is a living thing, in a very
strict sense that is no mere figure of speech. The body of the symbol changes
slowly, but its meaning inevitably grows, incorporates new elements and
throws off old ones...[A] symbol, once in being, spreads among the peoples.
In use and in experience, the meaning grows” (Quoted in Rochberg-Halton
1986:192).
Meaning building.
Meaning building.
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Building meaning.
Meaning. Building. Verb becomes noun, action becomes object;
and then object transgresses its own boundaries back into the realm of
action…
It is how Rossi engaged the profound memories of his past. It is how
he anticipated people would live with and within his buildings, seeing in
those forms their own memories of an architectural past, encouraging them
to reactivate those connections, those relationships in his buildings. “The
emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives
rise to new meanings” (Rossi 1981:19; emphasis mine). Perhaps, like this:
Confront the built form—it reminds you of other buildings and other experiences
you have had before—this new building feels familiar and established in your
understanding of “the given”—yet, you experience this building as something
different, it’s meaning has changed from what you thought it should be because of
the change in how you use the architecture—“the given” is expanded, enriched with
new meaning… meaning building. It is how Rossi “practiced” architecture—
by working analogically from drawings to buildings to writings, discovering
relationships, exploring the space where meaning happens, in between those
things which can be explicitly articulated, patently expressed.
Rather than specify how a building is to be used or interpreted, Rossi
preferred to create a theatrical architecture, always preparing the space of
the “just-before”, an architecture of anticipation where the scenario
described above might unfold. Stylistically, Rossi found recourse in a formal
language of maximum and redundancy—or, a prolific “redundance of
simplicity” (dal Co 1978:8)—and repeatedly invoked those “familiar objects,
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whose form and position are already fixed, but whose meanings may be
changed. Barns, stables, sheds, workshops, etc” (Rossi 1976:74). It is
important to remember that this formal simplification is not the inevitable
result of his interest in typology—such reliance on type does not predicate
minimal buildings, does not really predicate any specific aesthetic quality
whatsoever. Rossi added to his interest in the types of architecture a
deliberate ambiguity of signification in order to complicate those typological
associations. To instantiate the model of a particular architectural type which
is ambiguous (silent) about its relationship with that type or its attitude
towards the history of that type is to enter into a strange architectural world
where a poetic reservation impresses upon us the desire to contemplate (and
complete) the meaning of that world. Or so Rossi hoped. “Faced by your
designs or buildings, one is often overcome by a strange feeling, a mixture of
familiarity with something already seen and recognized, and the alienating
effect of a rather strange poetic vision” (Huet 1994:17). It is as if the building
is waiting for the activity of its use to complete the architecture.
This semantic ambiguity in his buildings has been the source of both
positive and negative criticism. On the one hand there are his admirers, who
are willing to venture into the arena of ambivalent signs—
aware that recourse to such elementary, non-figurative andarchaic geometrical figures was not only a way to escape thegarrulity of ‘speaking’ architecture to achieve, throughsilence, the effect of the great architecture of the past, but atthe same time to open the gates of the collective imagination,the memory attached to these forms.” (Huet 1986:212)
65
And they are willing to suspend the associations of his buildings with Fascist
architecture, prisons, and mental hospitals in order to pursue the “sacred
stillness” of this architecture of absolute purity—this purity precludes any
attempts to historicize these ambiguous forms (Jencks 1978:212-14).
Negative criticism directed at Rossi rebuts such white-washing as either
simple naïveté or blatant irresponsibility (Buchanan 1982 and Vogt 1983).
Responding to Rossi’s projects for the Modena cemetery and the Gallaratese
apartment building on display in the 15th Milan Triennial exhibition, Joseph
Rykwert, for example, lamented its extreme “abstraction of architecture from
all ideology”—an architecture of “sublime uselessness”, “dumb and
beautiful maybe, but dumb” (1973:4).
However, this refusal to speak, this “dumbness” of signification, is
essential to Rossi’s idea of architecture. In A Scientific Autobiography, Rossi
recalls a statement from a lecture he once gave in Zurich: “Meine
Architektur steht sprachlos und kalt [My architecture stands mute and
cold]”; he is alluding to a poem by Frederic Holderlin: “Die Mauren
stehn/Sprachlos und Kalt, im Winde/Klirren die Fahnen”, which is “The
walls stand/mute and cold, in the wind/the banners creak.” And this
muteness is not really a withholding of sound or words, but rather an
absence, the ineffable, “a way of saying nothing and everything” (Rossi
1981:44). Profound silence characterizes the space of the in-between and is
an essential feature of analogical thinking where the world lies just beyond
the grasp of logical thought and verbalization. It also characterizes the
territory of meaning where material practice and tacit knowing occur.11
11 See pp. 18-22.
66
Indeed, “tacit” comes from the Latin tacitus, meaning “silence.” In the
silence (tacitus) of Rossi’s forms and buildings, meaning and knowledge are
intended to be tacitly inferred by its inhabitants; that is, meaning is both
immanent and imminent, i.e. indwelling and waiting to be discovered by the
those who dwell there.
Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch write that “all knowing is action…
[it is] participation through indwelling” (1975:42, 44; emphasis mine). Tacit
knowing depends upon our ability to focus our attention away from the
particulars of a situation towards their joint meaning, the “more-than” of
these subsidiary parts working as a whole (see also Ross 1990 and 1999). For
example, consider a pointillist painting by Georges Seurat, who creates an
image by amassing hundreds of tiny, colored dots of paint (pixels) on the
canvas. In such a picture, if we move too close to the painting and focus on
the particulars (the dots) which form the image, that image—its joint
meaning—breaks apart; in understanding the meaning of the image, we “see
through” the pixels in order to know it (1975:34). When Rossi privileges an
architecture of silence and ambiguity, a forgotten architecture, he means to
keep architecture from imposing a set of prescribed limitations or particular
meanings upon the inhabitants so that the experience becomes not about the
declaration “Here is Architecture” but one where the user, taking full
advantage of tacit operations, begins to construct their own relationships
and meanings within the space according to how it is engaged and used—in
a sense, “seeing through” the particulars of the building. The architecture is
not inconsequential, but it can never be the focus of attention. For Rossi, this
means limitations and reservations and ambiguity—“mute and cold”—so
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that the inhabitants supply their own words and warmth and life to the
buildings, directing their attention towards the meaning of experience rather
than on the particulars of formal expression in architecture.
This process is akin to Norman Bryson’s conception of material
practice as a creative activity which constructs meaning. In writing of
representational simplification in proto-Renaissance paintings, he makes a
comment appropriate to Aldo Rossi’s architecture: “Contemplating these
despecified, evacuated forms, it is for the viewer to construct and to
improvise the forms into signification, through the competence he has
acquired from his own experience of the tacit operations of the connotational
codes…” (1983:76). As the site of cultural production, then, we are
compelled to interpret the sign “as material work, practice of painting and of
viewing; production, productivity” (130-1). As we have seen, though, with
Rossi, the connotational codes exhibit a deliberate muteness (sprachlos) in
order to cultivate an ambiguity of signification. Yet, the cultivation of
ambiguity does not imply a total lack of shared meaning, or a completely
relativized and chaotic hermeneutical free-for-all. Rossi brings his
architecture back from the brink of total abstraction by his careful insistence
on the power of memory to connect him, his writings, his drawings, his
buildings to the inhabitants of his architecture, to the cultural memory of
those inhabitants; in other words, as Francesco dal Co has realized, his
architecture “expresses a maximum simplification which corresponds to the
most powerful fullness of a narrative plot developed with architectural
forms to shape an enchanted space animated solely by memory” (1978:10).
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The latent structure upon which all of these analogical associations hinges is
the typology of architecture.
By accepting the modern schema theory of memory—that memory is
a dynamic process, consisting of both generic and episodic components and
influencing such factors as what is stored or what is recalled in memory—we
are in a position to admit that Aldo Rossi is unwittingly relying on (tacitly
inferring?) this conception of memory as the substantive foundation of his
creative work. In a sense, he is working through memory according to the rules
of schema theory; he is attempting to strike a difficult balance between
generic and specific elements in the staging of his architecture. According to
William Brewer, schema theory
proposes that one has to consider sets of events as potentiallyhaving a generic representation and a set of unique episodicrepresentations; and that repetition of the episodic eventsleads to interference in memory for these representations,while at the same time leading to improved memory for thegeneric aspects of the events. (Brewer 1995:51)
Rossi’s formal vocabulary is, in many ways, incredibly generic. By
combining fragments of recognized architectural types in his buildings and
by stripping these buildings (models) of any elements of narrative detail, he
creates a formal and compositional schema, that roster of forms (his
“catalogue”, his “dictionary”) which he repeats in project after project: the
smokestack, the pitched roof, the rectilinear arcade, the Brunelleschian
dome. In each design, however, these generic elements are instantiated with
an increasing complexity marked by “contamination,” the analogical
69
relationships fostered by the correspondences of unexpected typological
elements (see Rossi 1976:74; 1981:19, 35), and therefore become episodic
architectural events within the scope of Rossi’s oeuvre.
Rossi’s constructed architectural world would seem to display a
direct correlation to the schema theory of memory, therefore maximizing the
potential richness of his buildings in their correspondence with the
memories of those who inhabit them. The generic component of his
architecture lies in their reference to identifiable and recognizable types
which situates the inhabitants within the context of a larger cultural and
historical milieu. Then, each experience of his buildings becomes an unique
instantiation (episode) of these schematic, typological forms and
subsequently allows for the construction of new interpretations—the
deformation and evolution of the schema. Schema depend upon “an active
organisation [sic] of past reactions, or of past experiences” (Bartlett 1932:201).
As such, memories are temporary constructions rather than “discrete,
holistic, units” to be excavated from the depths of our minds (Conway
1995:67). Memory is a dynamic process—we reconstruct the past in each
present moment when we remember. For Rossi, the inventive nature of this
process is adopted in order to maintain a relationship to the history of
architecture, but also to inspire new meanings and associations
(correspondences) within that framework.
All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagineexplaining or be imagined explaining to himself that what hesought was always something lying ahead, and even if it wasa matter of the past it was a past that changed gradually as he
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advanced on his journey, because the traveler's past changesaccording to the route he has followed: not the immediatepast, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, butthe more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the travelerfinds again a past of his that he did not know he had: theforeignness of what you no longer are or no longer possesslies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. (Calvino1974:29)
Like the traveler in Invisible Cities, Rossi advances towards a place
lying ahead carried away by a rigorous practice of drawing, discovering an
ever changing past in every image he makes. An architecture which “stands
mute and cold” (generic), yet drawings and paintings which stand
expressive and charged (episodic)—this relationship characterizes the
analogical system comprised of Rossi’s architecture and drawings. Perhaps
constrained by the reserve he must maintain in his architectural designs,
drawing as a material practice allows Rossi’s heart and hand to give itself
over to an entirely direct expression, the indexical representation of his
working through memory. In drawing, his obsession with those profound
memories, scrutinized and mythologized in A Scientific Autobiography, is
transformed into an active engagement with the past which can lead him to
“foreign, unpossessed places” of invention; it is “purposive memory that
touches the present and infuses its wisdom onto the world of experience”
(Rochberg-Halton 1986:190), just barely escaping the clutches of a
degenerative nostalgia.
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An Architecture of Memory (33rd Room)
72
+ drawing on architecture drawing on memory drawing on meaning
To cite the past is to re-site the present and reveal in it theinstance of the contingent paths that lead us back while takingus forwards... (Chambers 237)
For an observer as astute as Rossi, dedicated also to observation as
the foundation of an education in architecture, the practices of drawing and
painting are fundamental to Rossi’s engagement. His observations and
memories are filtered and distilled through an obsessive and immediate
drawing practice. Frequently exhibited, this graphic work, too, has been the
object of a critical fascination and success—this tends to mystify and distort
its true relationship to his built architecture, to Rossi’s entire creative
process.12 And, of course, Rossi’s own writing about his drawings assists in
this mystification: “…I made the same drawings over and over, searching for
the web of connections in the life of man” (1981:66). That Rossi was such a
prolific maker of drawings and paintings may indicate an autonomous
artistic life, which can be considered as distinct or separate from his life as an
architect, especially since early on in his career he built fairly little. He
explicitly denies this kind of distinction, though, claiming a unity between
all of his creative media (Huet 1994:15). Yet the relationship between his
12 e.g. Peter Eisenman’s introduction to the American edition of TheArchitecture of the City (1982:3-11).
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architecture and drawings and paintings (and writings) is not as simple as
either of these characterizations. Rossi’s drawings are neither the unusually
“artistic” expressions of a technician nor just another resource in the toolbox
of creativity equal to all others. The drawings are both of these things, but
much more, too.
Elsewhere I have defined the analogical system as a “saying or
speaking between elements for the purpose of emphasis” which creates
territories of meaning (“middles”). This method leads to a description of the
particular relationship between Rossi’s drawings, buildings, and writings
(the analogues) and to an exploration of what meaning this interaction,
intersection, and superimposition of parts creates. Within this analogical
system, each of the analogues “retain their individual intensity while being
focused, interpreted, and related to other distinctive analogues” (Stafford
1999:9)—this notion of singularity is similar to our understanding of
autonomy in architecture. In this way, Rossi’s drawings are not buildings,
nor are they writing. They possess formal properties specific to the medium
and the act of drawing, and they belong to a particular history of
representation and image-making. Yet the drawings are integral to his
creative process and the meaning of his entire body of work—they do
“speak” to his other work, inextricably and analogically enriching each
other.
Perhaps the best way to begin an investigation of these drawings is to
methodically consider their various attributes, posing the question: what is
evident in a typical drawing by Aldo Rossi? and what is not evident?
Significantly, the drawings are not representations of singular, actual
74
buildings and sites, nor are they architectural project drawings—sections,
elevations, plans, presentation renderings—which provide detailed
information about the material or structure or the nature of construction (for
example, compare Figs. 4 and 7 with 18 and 19 and Figs. 8 and 17 with 20-
23). (Of course, due to the practical nature of the profession of architecture,
Rossi and his studio did produce both technical and presentation drawings
when dealing with clients and the actual construction of buildings.) Not
striving for any kind of pictorial realism, they are not illusions of three-
dimensional space which rely on traditional, western perspectival
conventions of spatial representation. In this sense, Rossi’s drawings are not
bound by the parameters we generally assume to influence the architectural
drawing; they do not exist as a “reduction or ‘picture’ of a building” (Perez-
Gomez 1982:5); “thus architecture became primarily the making of the
drawing (or the model), the same poetic act that has always magically
revealed the truth of reality: a process similar to the gnostic search for truth
by the enlightened architect” (7). Here, Alberto Perez-Gomez is commenting
on the projects of Boullée and Ledoux in order to reestablish the importance
of drawing in the overall meaning of architecture. Similarly, Rossi’s
drawings are “poetic acts”, works of self-expression and of self investigation
which constitute a dynamic, material engagement with architecture and its
many possibilities for meaning.
Pencils, pens, markers, watercolor, ink, paint, collage, photocopies of
previous drawings; executed on graph paper and paper scraps, sketchbooks
and drawings pads, newspapers and timetables, pieces of cardboard—these
are the raw materials of Rossi’s prolific drawing practice. And these
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materials are generally handled with an adeptness whose variable pace
seems to expose the relative urgency of Rossi’s need to realize an image at
any particular sitting (e.g. Fig. 20 and 28). At times, images are carefully
considered and composed: the line is even and nearly orthogonal—perhaps
even ruled—or the overall spatial effect of the drawing is brought to a
cohesive solidity by his attentive use of color and light and shadow,
therefore just surpassing the level of “sketch” (e.g. Fig. 21). Collage elements
may be tightly arranged, planned according to some organizational idea; or
there may a studied level of detail imparted to the objects within the
composition (e.g. Fig. 33). More often than not, though, the drawings are
fast, elemental, expressionistic as Rossi’s line moves frantically and
incrementally in order to discover the image which he has in mind. Swaths
of color are applied as quickly—strokes of marker, watercolor, or pastel are
laid down to suggest light and shadow or merely to rescue some object from
the obscurity of the dense tangle of filament-like marks.
A 1993 catalogue of Rossi’s drawings is a testament to the importance
of this work in a critical evaluation of his entire oeuvre, as well as his
popular success (Rossi 1993).13 As an extensive collection and taxonomy of
several key drawings, this publication is instrumental in giving a shape to
the corpus of Rossi’s drawings according to both their chronology and their
larger themes and subject matter. My intention is not to evaluate this
monograph nor to reclassify the drawings according to an alternative
taxonomical program. Yet, it is true that the drawings lend themselves to13 Rossi has had several museum and gallery exhibitions of his drawingsthroughout his career, and several articles and catalogues have featured hisgraphic work.
76
this kind of organization by virtue of Rossi’s persistent repetition of a
handful of images, forms, and representational conventions. He himself
says as much:
Perhaps the observation of things has remained my mostimportant formal education for observation later becomestransformed into memory. Now I seem to see all the things Ihave observed arrayed like tools in a neat row; they arealigned as in a botanical chart, or a catalogue, or a dictionary.But this catalogue, lying somewhere between imagination andmemory, is not neutral; it always reappears in several objectsand constitutes their deformation and, in some way, theirevolution. (Rossi 1981:23)
The immediacy with which Rossi constructs his drawings—making do, like
the bricoleur, with whatever material, whatever images he has on hand (see
Lévi-Strauss 1966 and Koetter and Rowe 1996:279-86 for more on the practice
of bricolage)—and the obsessive searching which this activity indexically
signifies (his line roams the page, like someone in a dark room who must
feel his way through it) consume this catalogue of observations, memories,
and imaginations. After a glance at a few of his drawings, we quickly
become accustomed to familiar objects and images, and then we are
sometimes surprised and attentive when new elements appear. The coffee
pots, the small cabins, the smokestacks and the monumental cubes from the
Modena cemetery, the outline of the arcades in the Gallaratese apartment
building, the hands of San Carlo, the lighthouses—they all reappear
throughout the body of work. As a process and a record of that process, the
special quality of the drawings is that maybe they are never brought to a
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point of completion but are always provisional, always capable of being
continued. So, in fact, Rossi does make the same drawing over and over
again; yet each drawing presents a different instantiation of those familiar
images and forms: a particular arrangement or composition or quality of
light, a different scale or set of relationships. He imbues them with a unique
specificity that embodies the active processes of both remembering and
inventing: “Likewise in my projects, repetition, collage, the displacement of
an element from one design to another, always places me before another
potential project which I would like to do by which is also a memory of some
other thing” (Rossi 1981:20).
Canaletto’s fantastic views of Venice (the capriccii), particularly one
which depicts two buildings and one unbuilt project by Palladio set
imaginatively along the Grand Canal, were instrumental in suggesting to
Rossi the idea of the “analogous city”, a compositional model in which “the
geographical transposition of the monuments within the painting constitutes
a city that we recognize, even though it is a place of purely architectural
references” (Rossi 1982:166). In many of his drawings, then, he revisits and
reconstructs the “analogous city” repeatedly, inserting and combining
several of his most prominent architectural forms and buildings in
fantastical arrangements and milieus. Rossi adds another dimension to these
images by mingling his architectural forms with such quotidian objects as
coffeepots, soda cans, phonebooks, and cigarette packs, objects which clearly
refer analogically to those formal types so evident in his buildings—cylinder,
cube, cone (e.g. Fig. 24-27). His drawings of these kinds of items obviously
78
reference the long tradition of still life painting in the history of art,
specifically the Cubist fascination with everyday objects as suitable subject
79
Fig. 34. Capriccio, Goivanni Antonio Canaletto, 1753-59. Reprinted fromAldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City, 166.
matter for their formal explorations—the work and technique of Picasso,
Braque, and Le Corbusier, for example. The effect of these strange
juxtapositions of personal items and monumental buildings is to enhance the
imaginative character of the drawings by complicating the scale at which we
are to understand these forms. Are the coffeepot and the phonebook
dramatically enlarged to the scale of the buildings, or are the buildings
miniaturized to the scale of the everyday objects? Like Canaletto’s views of
Venice, these drawings invite us into the space of memory and imagination
where we witness the exploration of Rossi’s remembered observations,
80
images which suggest a reality unto themselves that is analogous to a so-
called “objective”, proper reality.
Of course, we have seen (and so had Rossi) similar depictions of the
space of memory and imagination before in the paintings of Giorgio de
Chirico, whose so-called metaphysical paintings of the early 20th century
show eerily silent and empty Italian piazzas penetrated by late-afternoon
light and punctuated by long shadows. Eugene J. Johnson has noted that a
major exhibition of de Chirico’s paintings, which included several of these
monumental cityscapes, was held in Milan in 1970 and they surely had an
immediate effect on Rossi (1981:48-9).14 The prevalent image of the
smokestack or cone seems directly derived from de Chirico’s images, as does
the convention of placing stark architectural forms within flat, barren
landscapes and modeling them with a wintry light and deep, dark shadows
(e.g. Fig. 21 and 27). De Chirico, too, made the same kind of painting again
and again, and part of these images’ infectious power lies in their
corroboration with the memory of architecture. This is the “de-realization”
of architecture into a primarily “aesthetic presence”, an architecture frozen
dramatically in that stark light and reproduced several times over in that
moment like the memory of some exceptionally haunting and beautiful time
(Harries 1982:65-6). Rossi draws (on) the memory of this moment repeatedly
as well, searching for a poetic meaning in the buildings, spaces, and
experiences of his past:
14 Rossi also claims an affinity with the work of Mario Sironi and GiorgioMorandi, twentieth century Italian painters.
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I have always known that architecture was determined by thehour and the event; and it was this hour that I sought in vain,confusing it with nostalgia, the countryside, summer: it wasan hour of suspension, the mythic cinco del la tarde of Seville,but also the hour of the railroad timetable, of the end of thelesson, of dawn. (1981:80)
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An Architecture of Memory (60th Room)
83
+ epilogue: l’architecture des ombres
The myth of the origin of painting can be traced back to Pliny’s
account in his Natural History, written in the first century AD. Even at that
time, though, the story was already ancient, part fable, part history.15 The
story is easily told: the daughter of Butades, a potter from Corinth, traces the
outline of the shadow of her lover on the wall as he sleeps the night before
he departs to fight in a war. Thus, the simple act of inscribing the projected
outline of the figure on a wall inspires the entire tradition of pictorial
representation in Western civilization. The dream of the origin of painting is
the desire to wrench from time that which is transient and fleeting—the
lover gone to war—by fixing its shadow in time and place and, by visual
synecdoche, fixing the thing itself. In essence, the image of the lover is an
image borne of the negative, of the absence of light, where the only
contiguous presence uniting the real and its image is the outline, the border
between light and dark, between “this” and “that.”
To mark the shadow of her lover is also to mark the shadow of the
past—memory. As a memento of the young man, his drawn outline on the
15 I first discovered this story and its depiction in western painting in acontemporary art theory seminar taught by Richard Shiff. See also A Short ofHistory of the Shadow by Victor I. Stoichita (1997) for more on the significanceof shadows in the history of western art.
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Fig. 35. L’architecture des ombres (First Iteration). Drawing by the author.
wall gives her cause to remember him, but the image must be completed by
the young woman in her imagination in order to fully express the vital
presence of her absent lover; the outline must be filled in with all the
splendour that remembrance can entail. Interestingly, the story continues
when, after news of the lover’s death in battle, Butades fills in the outlines of
the image with clay, thus modeling in relief an effigy of the departed (and
so, says Pliny, inventing the plastic art of sculpture). However, in this act of
85
memorial perhaps the father has gone too far, has passed into the world of
reified realism where the portrait of death takes precedence over the shadow
of life. The former denies the creative potential of remembering in the
movement towards verisimilitude, whereas the latter promotes it by
remaining analogically related to its subject.
In Pliny’s myth the act of painting transforms the negative into the
positive—an absence is endowed with presence. But there is a dialectical
imperative which binds the figure to its shadow and which suggests the
bond between life and death.
All devotees of deep shadows, from Goya to Giorgio deChirico, from Boullée to Louis Kahn, are addicts of themonumental, that is, they are entangled in the dialectic of lifeand death, compensated by deep insights, and threatened bypathos and manic repetitions. (Vogt 1983:88)
Aldo Rossi, of course, is one such devotee, and the poetic of “the architecture
of shadows” permeates his entire oeuvre. No doubt he finds a special solace
and inspiration in this passage from Boullée’s Essai, which he quotes in his
introduction to that work:
I found myself in the countryside, skirting a wood bymoonlight. My effigy, produced by light, caught my attention(surely this was nothing new to me). By a special state ofmind, that semblance's effect seemed to me one of an extremesadness. What did I see in it? The objects' silhouettes standout in black against a light of extreme paleness. Struck withthese feelings, I occupied myself at that moment with making
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a special application to architecture... (Quoted in Rossi1989:46)
Fig. 36. Photo by the author.
We may imagine that the daughter of Butades experienced some similar
effect that night as she contemplated her lover and his shadow cast upon the
earthen wall by the light of a flame. Can we empathize with the prick of
pain she might have felt at his looming departure and the urge to stave off
87
the agony of that separation by doing something, by lovingly capturing that
deep shadow in an image?
In an architecture of shadows, whether manifest in buildings or
drawings, Rossi refers to a profound architectural image: like Butades’
daughter, he marks the outline of the shadow of the past in order to arrest it
from time, in order to inject memory with all the possibility of an
unforeseeable, yet obtainable, future.
It is not by chance that Rossi's work tends to turn in on itself,that his design inclines toward self-motivation. It tends tobecome picture, the last threshold of the sacred; in this courseis contained the narration of an infinite nostalgia for the lostworld of architecture, and for its effectiveness. In thetransformation of the project into pure graphics, maximumliberty coincides with the exposition of a fully nostalgiccondition. (Dal Co 1978:13)
The desire to repeatedly return to this image of architecture resides in that
space between memory and imagination, between the event and the
memory of the event, between the object and its shadow. It depends upon
the knowledge that presence and absence are figured by an architecture of
shadows, and that that image may suggest an historical continuity, a link
between the irretrievable past, the fleeting present, and the unrealized
future. Aldo Rossi’s poetics of architecture—a practice of building, drawing,
and writing—actively seeks out this very tenuous balance of time. It is a
dangerous proposition. In his journey through the corridors of memory,
always he risks lapsing into a pathological nostalgia; in his silencing of the
88
architectural codes in order to anticipate and accommodate future events, he
risks complete abstraction, the abyss of a world without shadows.
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An Architecture of Memory (61st Room)
90
+ appendix A: consequential data
Equally important to the development of this thesis are the paintings,
drawings, and prints that I have made over the course of my research and
writing for this text. Recall from the preface that my architectural odyssey
began with a small drawing and subsequent paintings of an image
materialized from the depths of my memory and imagination—this recent
work continues that project with hopefully more complexity and more
understanding of its original motivations. The following color plates (as
well as those which appear at the beginning and end of each of the previous
sections) represent the body of work I have made “in response” to many of
the fundamental ideas embodied in this thesis: the importance of memory in
the meaning of architecture and the omni-presence of architecture in
memory, the similarities between a typology of architectural and memory
schema, the connections between the constructive nature of the process of
memory and the practice and process of painting and drawing and
printmaking. Perhaps more simply stated, though, these works constitute
my visual thinking on that subject. For me, they are an essential contribution
(as in Aldo Rossi’s oeuvre) to the kind of analogical thinking which is
necessary to fully exploring a given subject as well as expressing my
particular relationship to it.
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An Architecture of Memory (11th Room)1 of a series of 70
lino-cut print, acrylic on paper4 x 4 ½”
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There Is No Placeacrylic, latex on canvas
40 x 50”
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Whitewashingacrylic, latex, oil on canvas
40 x 50”
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Chunkacrylic, enamel on canvas
21 x 24”
95
Chez L’eauacrylic on canvas
21 x 24”
96
Ur-urbanacrylic, enamel on canvas
24 x 21”
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L’architecture des Ombres (2nd iteration)lino-cut prints on cut paper, pins,
acrylic, vellum, thread60 x 52”
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L’architecture des Ombres (2nd iteration)details
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+ appendix B: excerpts from A Scientific Autobiography
The essence of A Scientific Autobiography relates to attitude andtechnique, rather than to models or solutions, and is thereforedifficult to capture. It is something like the work of adetective: the murder is committed, and there is nothing to bedone but to follow the tracks of the murderer. (Lerup 1984:59)
Excerpts from A Scientific Autobiography:
Ever since my first projects, where I was interested in purism,I have loved contaminations, slight changes, self-commentaries, and repetitions. (1)
If I were to redo this project [the Modena cemetery], perhaps Iwould do it exactly the same; perhaps I would redo all myprojects in the same way. Yet it is also true that everythingthat has happened is already history, and it is difficult to thinkthat things could occur in any other way. (15)
Thus the temporal aspect of architecture no longer resided inits dual nature of light and shadow or in the aging of thethings; it rather presented itself as a catastrophic moment inwhich time takes things back. (16)
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Likewise in my projects, repetition, collage, the displacementof an element from one design to another, always places mebefore another potential project which I would like to do butwhich is also a memory of some other thing.Because of this, cities, even if they last for centuries, are inreality great encampments of the living and the dead where afew elements remain like signals, symbols, warnings. Whenthe holiday is over, the elements of architecture are in tatters,and the sand again devours the street. There is nothing left todo but resume, with persistence, the reconstruction ofelements and instruments in expectation of another holiday.(20)
I felt that disorder, if limited and somehow honest, might bestcorrespond to our state of mind.But I detested the arbitrary disorder that is indifferent toorder, a kind of moral obtuseness, complacent well-being,forgetfulness.To what, then, could I have aspired in my craft?Certainly to small things, having seen that the possibility ofgreat ones was historically precluded. (23)
It turns our that this idea of the interior, like the green of thegarden, is stronger than the building itself. You can alreadyread the project in existing houses, select it from a repertorywhich you can easily procure, pursue it in the variants of itsproduction, in the actor’s cues, in the atmosphere of thetheater, and always be surprised by Hamlet’s uncertainties,never knowing whether he is truly a good prince, aseverything conspires to make us believe.Perhaps a design is merely the space where the analogies intheir identification with things once again arrive at silence.The relationships are a circle that is never closed; only a foolwould think of adding the missing part or changing themeaning of the circle. Not in purism but in the unlimited
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contamination of things, of correspondences, does silencereturn. The drawing can be suggestive, for as it limits it alsoamplifies memory, objects, events. (35)
I am disgusted by anyone who speaks of art as “liberation.”Such a comment belongs to superficial criticism and,ultimately, to a superficial conception of art. As in the statuesof the Sacri Monti of S., which I passed almost every day,what I admired was not their art; rather I pursued therelentlessness, the story, the repetition, and was content thatin some way, even if it were painful, virtue would triumph inthe end. It is like seeing the same film or play many times andthus being free from the desire to know the end. Toexperience this effect I often go to the cinema when the film ishalf over or just ending; in this way one meets the charactersin their conclusive moments, and then once can rediscover theaction that happened earlier or imagine an alternative. (38)
This autobiography of my projects is the only means by whichI can talk about them. I also know that one way or another itdoes not matter. Perhaps this again signifies forgettingarchitecture, and perhaps I have already forgotten it when Ispeak of the analogous city or when I repeat many times inthis text that every experience seems definitive to me, that it isdifficult for me to define a past and a future. (53)
Almost paradoxically, whenever there is a loss of desire, thefrom, the project, the relation, love itself, are cut off from usand so can be represented. I do not know how much of this iscause for joy or for melancholy, but I am certain that desire issomething that exists beforehand or that lives in a generalsense; it cannot coexist with any design process or ritual. Attimes I think that the best situation is always that of
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experiencing something after desire is dead; for this reason Ihave always loved unbuilt projects… (57)
Memory and specificity as characteristics enabling therecognition of the self and of what is foreign to it seem to methe clearest conditions and explanations of reality. Specificitycan not exist without memory, nor can memory that does notemanate from a specific moment: only the union of the twopermits the awareness of one’s own individuality and itopposite (of self and non-self). (62)
The widows’ walks on the house of New England recall theGreek ritual of scanning the sea for what does not return—asubstitution of ritual for pain, just as obsession is asubstitution for desire. Similarly the repetition of the form ofthe tympanum on a building does not cause the event itself torecur. The event might not even happen anyway. I am moreinterested in the preparations, in what might happen on amidsummer night. In this way, architecture can be beautifulbefore it is used; there is beauty in the wait, in the roomprepared for the wedding, in the flowers and the silver beforeHigh Mass. (66)
The tower of my Venetian theater might be a lighthouse or aclock; the campanile might be a minaret or one of the towersof the Kremlin: the analogies are limitless, seen, as they are,against the background of this preeminently analogous city. Ithink it was at Izmir that I watched and heard the awakeningminarets in insomniac dawns; in Moscow, I experience thefrisson of the Kremlin’s towers and sense the world of theMongols and of wooden watchtowers set on some boundlessplain—I sensed things in this way far more than as elementsreducible to those we call architecture. (67)
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We could speak of every project as if it were an unfinishedlove affair: it is most beautiful before it ends.And for every authentic artist this means the desire toremake, not in order to effect some change (which is the markof superficial people) but out of a strange profundity offeelings for things, in order to see what action develops in thesame context, or how, conversely, the context makes slightalterations in the action. (78)
In speaking of these objects and projects of mine, I think onceagain of ending my work as an architect. It is a task that Ihave always attempted. I used to think that my last project,like the last known city, like the last human relationship,would be a search for happiness, identifying happiness with asort of peace. Yet it may rather be the happiness of an intensebut always definitive restlessness. As a result, every momentof becoming conscious of things is merged with a wish to beable to abandon them, to gain a sort of freedom that lies onlyin the experience of them, something like an obligatory rite ofpassage, which is necessary so that things might have theirmeasure. (78)
I have always known that architecture was determined by thehour and the event; and it was this hour that I sought in vain,confusing it with nostalgia, the countryside, summer: it wasan hour of suspension, the mythic cinco del la tarde of Seville,but also the hour of the railroad timetable, of the end of thelesson, of dawn. (80)
Thus, this book is perhaps simply the history of a project, andlike every project, it must be conclusive in some way, every ifonly so that it can be repeated with slight variations or
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displacements, or assimilated into new projects, new places,and new techniques—other forms of which we always catch aglimpse of life. (84)
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Berman, Morris. The Reenchantment of the World. Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1981.
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+ vita
Jeremy Beaudry makes meaning out of the memory of architecture.
Born the only son of John and Barbara Beaudry in 1974 in Cedar Rapids,
Iowa, he was then set loose in southern Indiana; reigned in in Albuquerque,
New Mexico; discovered in Philadelphia, PA; reborn in Rome; and nearly
hog-tied in Texas. From 1990-93 he studied art with the esteemed Claude J.
Falcone at Penncrest High School, and later received a BFA in painting from
the Tyler School of Art in 1997. The next three years outside of academia
were poorly spent but somewhat adventurous, nevertheless. He continued
to produce and exhibit artwork until entering the University of Texas at
Austin in the fall of 2000.
Permanent address:
106 S. New Middletown Rd.
Media, PA 19063
This thesis was typed by the author—c’est moi.
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