Singular as the circumstance may appear, some of the greatest Italian architects of the last century continue even today to be better known abroad than in their homeland. The most conspicuous case is that of the Rationalist school’s founder Giuseppe Terragni (1904 – 1943) who, above all in the United States, is a genuine object of veneration, as masters such as Philip Johnson (1906 – 2005) and Richard Meier (1934) have repeatedly attested. Yet the list should include, at the very least, Gio Ponti (1891 – 1979) and Aldo Rossi (1931 – 1997)[1] as well. With one glaring difference, however, if one considers that Ponti is a star in continual ascent (one need only think of the monographs and exhibitions devoted to him in various countries, or of the dizzying sums fetched at auction by the design objects he conceived, beginning with the well-known déco porcelains produced by Richard-Ginori), whereas over Rossi a palpable veil of neglect seems to have fallen.

In reality, Rossi’s fortunes reached a peak of genuine international consecration with the great exhibition that the Beaubourg devoted to his work in the summer of 1991[2]. For Rossi that show amounted to a further international consecration, no less significant than the award, the previous year, of the Pritzker Prize, commonly regarded as a kind of Nobel of architecture[3]. It confirmed, moreover, the exceptional season of good fortune that Italian designers were enjoying abroad, beginning in the undisputed capitals of international culture and finance. In the three decades since, the situation has changed a great deal, and our country’s inclusion among the archistars has grown rare, entrusted above all to the name of Renzo Piano (1937), who, in the celebrated tandem with Richard Rogers (1933), had been the very designer of the mammoth Parisian exhibition machine; and, perhaps, to that of Massimiliano Fuksas (1944). The 1991 exhibition nonetheless had a rather exceptional flavour, which not a few – at least among the professionals – still recall. First of all thanks to the elegance of the installation (designed by two of Rossi’s close collaborators, Alberto Ferlenga and Massimo Scheurer) and to the variety of the material on display: projects, models, the formidable drawings of the Milanese architect (the object of discerning private collecting; the architect’s private archive, which passed into the collections of the MAXXI and, after being subjected to a scholarly inventory, became the subject of a dedicated exhibition at the Roman museum in 2004)[4]. Ending with the signature photographs of the completed works [with particular prominence those of Luigi Ghirri (1943 – 1992) (figs. 1-2)[5].

In short, a rich and intriguing repertoire that served to lift the Parisian show out of the rather monotonous, initiatory atmosphere usually reserved for architecture exhibitions. The evocative exhibition space had been conceived along the lines of a floor plan such as to call to mind an apartment laid out in ample rooms opening to right and left off a central corridor, meant to house drawings and models. An exhibition that went beyond the meaning of a solo show, one of those customarily devoted to an acknowledged master of contemporary architecture, to rise to the role of an articulate reflection on the destiny of our cities, for the most part marked by strongly historicised urban contexts[6].

Nor was that all: in the atrium of the Beaubourg, in the space set aside for the sale of designer objects, Rossi’s celebrated postmodern coffee pots were selling like hotcakes; while the furniture of his own design – the Parigi armchair (fig. 3), the Milano and Teatro chairs, the Carteggio and Convento sideboards – was displayed with full honours, on the refined rue des Saints Pères, beside the Académie Française. This prominence proved all the more telling if one reflected on the fact that the Milanese architect (who was just then reaching the age of sixty), famous in Germany, the United States and Japan, was far less so in France, and specifically in Paris, where in any case a substantial residential and commercial development was being completed just behind the Villette, at the time the only Rossian architecture existing on French soil, together with the small but wonderfully happy museum of contemporary art at Vassivière in the Limousin (fig. 4)[7].

As Bernard Huet surmised in the course of a long interview with the architect, in all likelihood it was precisely the Paris exhibition that must have furnished the fitting occasion to draw the vigorous attention of French culture and patronage to the Italian designer. He had certainly been ill served – as Huet recalled – by the fact of having become famous first of all through his work as an essayist (Rossi’s volume The Architecture of the City[8], published in 1966 at a moment of particularly acute crisis in the discipline, debased by an exasperated functionalism, by the trivialisation of the international style, by careerism, had become a major international publishing success). Secondly, on account of the drawings, prized as autonomous works and sought after by collectors, above all Americans, who had driven them to four-figure prices (in dollars), unusual for sheets of contemporary architecture. Only at a third stage did Rossi establish himself as the author of buildings actually built, in concrete, stone and brick; as an architect removed, in short, from the realm of Utopia.

It should indeed be borne in mind that Rossi’s public fame, beyond of course the narrow circles of the professionals, dates back to the late 1970s, with the hugely successful Teatro del Mondo, moored, like a dreamlike floating lighthouse, before the Punta della Dogana (in direct dialogue with it), within sight of the basilica of San Marco in Venice (fig. 5)[9]. And then, little by little, with completed works and projects that remained at the stage of conception (yet culturally operative), which must be counted among the most famous and perhaps exemplary achievements of contemporary architecture: the Berlin schemes on Südliche Friedrichstrasse and Rauchstrasse; the arrangement of the Fontivegge area in Perugia; the reconstruction of the Carlo Felice theatre in Genoa; the town hall of Borgoricco; the Aurora office building in Turin; the Centro Torri hypermarket in Parma; the Il Palazzo hotel in Fukuoka. Given the presumable primary destination of this text, I may be permitted to underline the Umbrian and Perugian scheme at Fontivegge, which resolved a public urban context, close to the railway station, that had until then been consigned to the decay of a disused industrial settlement[10]. A piazza (entirely paved in terracotta and marble), a theatre (with its conical tower), a fountain, a public building (named the Broletto, after the Po Valley tradition, intended to house the offices of the Region of Umbria). The complex dwells in a metaphysical aura perhaps more than any other Rossian architecture and, what is more, skilfully takes up the topographical change of level of a complex urban context (figs. 6-7).

A body of work, in short, that grew richer with the passing years, in singular contrast with the scarcity of what was built in the initial portion of Rossi’s activity, which, from the Monument to the Resistance in Cuneo to the square at Segrate, to the town hall of Scandicci, took shape rather as a set of fascinating theoretical exercises; or, to put it in realistic terms, a repertoire from which young architects the world over have drawn by the handful. “My finest competition projects – Rossi wrote – were all duly rejected […] and it is ridiculous that these same works should then become the models produced in schools and in practice”.

A body of work that, with the passing of the years, met with its misunderstandings, its opponents and detractors. Thus the new cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena was for a long time harshly criticised. The theme was a delicate one, after the crisis of the neoclassical cemetery model, and it carried the risk of ideological overstatement, beginning with the absence of religious symbols (figs. 8-9)[11]. “The cubic construction with its regular windows has the structure of a house without floors and without roofs; the windows are without frames, cuts in the wall; it is the house of the dead, in architecture an unfinished and therefore abandoned house. This unfinished and abandoned work is analogous to death”[12].

For its part the Milanese daily Il Giornale, still under Montanelli’s editorship, had waged an equally harsh polemic against Rossi’s cube in Piazzetta Manzoni in Milan (fig. 10)[13].

A body of work, moreover, consistently marked by a strongly personal, unmistakable, extremely rigorous style, albeit of surprising compositional simplicity (fig. 11)[14]. Singularly limited is the abacus of terms, of the stylistic features that recur in the language of Aldo Rossi: the portico, the gallery, the square windows, the columns, the cube, the sphere, the last of these a probable homage to Étienne Louis Boullée (1728 – 1799), architect of the Revolution, whose famous theoretical text Architecture. Essay on Art (Marsilio, Padua 1967) Rossi had translated and introduced. The question takes on great importance, since the celebrated Austrian art historian Hans Sedlmayr (1896 – 1984) had chosen to locate precisely in the utopian architectures of Boullée and of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux (1736 – 1806) the wellspring of what he had defined, with successful coinages, The Loss of the Centre and The Revolution of Modern Art, formulas and a perspective against which Rossi had, publicly and in good time, taken a stand in a text of his from 1958[15].

“I believe […] – Rossi writes – without betraying myself, that I can still affirm, looking at each of my projects: ‘It is strange how I resemble myself’. […] This resemblance is more evident in the daily repetition, in the love of objects, of fragments and wounds, in the impossible daily round of the craft, in the pursuit, by every system or technique, of the perfection of a system in which, in the end, the fragments ought to be rejoined”[16].

Nor should we forget the realm of adolescent fascinations, beginning with the Cabina dell’Elba[17] (fig. 12), a reminiscence that is, among other things, the generating element of a project, though unbuilt, very dear to the architect, the student residence at Chieti[18] (fig. 13).

Nor should we be surprised at the emergence of openly autobiographical elements in his language: “There is no art – Rossi asserts – that is not autobiographical”; nor should we marvel at a compositional method founded on the continual assembly of the few formal elements already mentioned: “In this repetition […] perhaps lies art and, with it, naturally, architecture”. And yet, on closer inspection, such apparent simplicity risks becoming misleading: Rossi is an architect nourished by history as few others are; one need only cast one’s mind back to the extraordinary project that won the international competition for the German Historical Museum in Berlin (fig. 14), in all probability the qualitative summit of Rossi’s entire output (with its evocation of Schinkel and of the facings in “brick typical of old Berlin and the bands of blue and yellow majolica”)[19].

And, above all, Rossi is a deeply cultivated man, of boundless reading (in his youth he was in fact reproached for an excess of bookish culture) and of intellectual curiosities that ranged from theatre to cinema to the visual arts. With particular attention to the architecture of the “Italian road to the Modern” of the 1930s and to the chronologically earlier repertoire of Metaphysical painting: Giorgio de Chirico (1888 – 1978), Mario Sironi (1885 – 1961), Carlo Carrà (1881 – 1966), Giorgio Morandi (1890 – 1964), Felice Casorati (1886 – 1963), to whom a pre-eminent rank was implicitly acknowledged; but also the hyperrealist Hopper (1882 – 1967), all of whom seemed to interpret (and amplify) that sense of fixity without evolution that was particularly congenial to the Lombard architect.

He, for his part, loved the activity of writing; he was a spinner of tales: “I happen to be happy when I write, happier than when I draw or conceive projects, as if writing were closer to thought”. And he did so in a truly captivating manner, drawing on great evocative power, as the reader of A Scientific Autobiography can appreciate, a book that appeared in its original language only after coming out in the United States in 1981 and being translated into Spanish, Japanese, German and French.

“I loved the settling of the Pantheon described in the books on statics; the unforeseen crack, a visible but contained collapse, lends an immense force to architecture, because its beauty could not have been foreseen […] Perhaps this alone interested me in architecture […] a precise form that fought against time until it was destroyed by it”.

Modern or postmodern, Rossi? Withering was his reply to a journalist who had questioned him on the matter: “No, I have never been postmodern, because I have never been modern”. Indeed, against the Modern Movement, or rather: against the sterile shallows of modernism – since he always counted Adolf Loos (1870 – 1933) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886 – 1969) among his masters – Rossi’s polemic was early and peremptory. He constantly charged the Modern Movement with indifference to the historical and cultural context; with the severing of continuity, of the vital graft into the history of the discipline; with the attitude, ultimately bourgeois, that underlies its ideology.

“It seemed to me that modern architecture, as it presented itself, was a set of vague notions, dominated by a second-hand sociology, by a political deception, by a bad aestheticism”. Provoking scandal, as early as the 1950s and 1960s, Rossi claimed the positive qualities of Stalinist architecture, that capacity to make city, which was instead absent from so much modernist architecture, beginning with the impassably tedious repetitiveness of the International Style.

He also said: “To the long corridors of the typological schemes of the modern movement, I opposed the long corridors of the Lombard houses”. And again: “All things considered, Argan’s book on Gropius was a fine novel, but it did not concern itself with the facts”.

And what did Rossi think of hi-tech architecture? “Technique must always be the technique of what is possible, and not a falsification of the future”: a good dose of scepticism, then. But woe betide anyone who mistakes these choices for a backward-looking option; only a fool could so trivially misread an architect who had chosen as his heraldic cartouche a poetic but unequivocal image from Walter Benjamin (1892 – 1940): “To come out of our shell in order to listen to the sound of the world, of our century”.

Aldo Rossi died in Milan on 4 September 1997. His physical passing inevitably entails a dimming of public visibility, all the more so because the prevailing directions of the discipline now seem to favour different lines. Beyond the architecture itself, Rossi’s memory is entrusted to the three imposing volumes of the Complete Works, edited by Alberto Ferlenga for the publisher Electa[20].

Notes

[1] In 2005 the heirs Vera and Fausto Rossi established the “Fondazione Aldo Rossi”, under the scholarly direction of Germano Celant, which preserves, safeguards and manages the photographic archive and the catalogue of works: https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org.

[2] Aldo Rossi par Aldo Rossi, architecte, curator Alain Guiheux, Galerie du Cci, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (26 June – 30 September 1991).

[3] https://www.pritzkerprize.com/laureates/1990

[4] The personal archive of Aldo Rossi was acquired by the State in 2001. Cf. E. Terenzoni (ed.), Aldo Rossi. L’archivio personale – Inventario, Archivi di Architettura, MAXXI architettura, Rome 2004.

[5] Cf. P. Costantini, Luigi Ghirri – Aldo Rossi, Electa, Milan, 1996. Some images online: https://archivioluigighirri.com/artworks/per-aldo-rossi.

[6] Register of the works of Aldo Rossi: http://www.maxxi.art/sezioni_web/aldo_rossi/aldo%20rossi/immagini/regesto%20opere.pdf

[7] http://www.ciapiledevassiviere.com/

[8] Cf. A. Rossi, The Architecture of the City, Padua 1966. On the writing and the publishing fortunes of this book: Aldo Rossi, the story of a book. The Architecture of the City, from 1966 to today, ed. F. De Maio, A. Ferlenga, P. Montini Zimolo (latest editions: Il Saggiatore, Milan 2018; Quodlibet, Macerata 2011).

[9] Cf. M. Brusatin and A. Prandi (eds.), Aldo Rossi: Teatro del mondo, Venice 1982; https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org/opere/1970-1979/teatro-del-mondo-venezia-1979/

[10] https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org/opere/1980-1989/edifici-pubblici-teatro-e-fontana-zona-fontivegge/

[11] Cf. E. J. Johnson, What Remains of Man-Aldo Rossi’s Modena Cemetery in “Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians”, 41, 1982, pp. 38-54.

[12] Cf. G. Braghieri, Aldo Rossi, Zanichelli, Bologna 1989, p. 44.

[13] https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monumento_a_Sandro_Pertini; https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org/opere/1980-1989/monumento-a-sandro-pertini/

[14] On the occasion of the 1983 Modena exhibition presenting drawings, oils and watercolours relating to the competition for the New Cemetery of San Cataldo, Aldo Rossi conceived the “Macchina modenese”, a construction seven metres high, made of painted building timber, capable of rendering clearly the cultural and symbolic meaning of his architecture. The drawing that served to set out its construction is preserved in the Fondazione Modena Arti Visive. https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org/opere/1980-1989/monumento-a-sandro-pertini/

[15] Cf. A. Rossi, Una critica che respingiamo, in “Casabella-Continuità”, 219, 1958, pp. 33-35.

[16] Cf. A. Rossi, Frammenti, in A. Ferlenga (ed.), Architetture 1959- 1987, Milan 1987, p. 7.

[17] https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org/opere/1980-1989/armadio-cabina-dellelba/

[18] Chieti, invited competition for the student residence (1976), project with Gianni Braghieri and Arduino Cantafora.

[19] https://www.fondazionealdorossi.org/opere/1980-1989/progetto-di-concorso-per-deutsches-historisches-museum/

[20] A. Ferlenga, ed.: Aldo Rossi Architetture, 1959-1987, Milan 1988; Aldo Rossi Architetture 1988-1993, Milan 1993; Aldo Rossi opera completa 1993-1996, Milan 1996.

Carlo Fabrizio Carli, a critic of contemporary art and architecture, besides his numerous writings and exhibitions, has curated the “Premio Michetti”, the “Premio Vasto”, the “Triennale d’arte sacra” of Celano and the “Premio Termoli”, the Biennale d’Arte Sacra of San Gabriele.