“Alcuni dei miei progetti”: Aldo Rossi and the Editorial Impulse
2019; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 11; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/702751
ISSN2329-1249
Autores Tópico(s)Italian Fascism and Post-war Society
ResumoPrevious articleNext article Free“Alcuni dei miei progetti”: Aldo Rossi and the Editorial ImpulseMaura LuckingMaura LuckingPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s second book, A Scientific Autobiography (1981), does not make for an easy read. It has no clear exposition or organization, meandering instead through readings of the postwar European landscape, making connections between the works of other artists and scholars and his own childhood memories. A brief preface introduces the project as an impossible effort to track the influence of small experiences on the development of the architect’s craft—a paean to the “disorder of things.”1 It is the type of book that one might open to any number of pages and have a similarly pleasant, if disorienting, reading experience—more like an Oulipo tone poem than an architectural manifesto. When his slippery indefinite articles momentarily bring building, life, and memory into alignment, however, it can be sublime in its associative pursuit of meaning.Some of the most powerful passages revolve around the architect’s recovery from a life-threatening car accident. Confined to his hospital bed, Rossi jotted down the notes that would shape his best-known built project, the stark and cavernous San Cataldo Cemetery (fig. 1). What follows seems intended to provide insight into that project’s formation. He considers the architectural expression of his condition, including abstractions of prone bodies such as those on the facade of the convent of Santa Clara at Santiago de Compostela in Galicia (fig. 2). The building, he writes, expands on the iconographic tradition of the deposition of Christ; its overscaled, anthropomorphic decoration works to produce an embodied response in viewers. The modeling effects of light on the sculptural facade are then compared, in short order, with the work of the divisionist painter Angelo Morbelli. The artist was best known for his light-filled meditations on the end of life, set in hospitals and retirement centers—much like the one in which Rossi was convalescing (fig. 3). Rossi writes:A diffuse luminosity pervades the large room, where the figures lose themselves as in a piazza. The practice of carrying naturalism to its extreme consequences leads to a kind of metaphysics of the object; things, old people’s bodies, light, a cold ambience—all are offered through a kind of observation that seems distant. Yet this emotionless distance is precisely the deathly air of the poorhouse.2This careful prose underlines several points. First, the rapid-fire pace at which Rossi processed references and precedents for his work, and their diversity across architecture, the arts, and personal experience. Next, the relative abstraction of his writing style, despite its narrative precision. What room, whose bodies, and what emotionless distance? How does such writing operate, and what is its relationship with San Cataldo or, given its place within an autobiography, the architect himself?Fig. 1. Aldo Rossi (Italian, 1931–97), architect. San Cataldo Cemetery, built 1971. Image © Dianne Harris.Fig. 2. Convent of Santa Clara, Santiago de Compostela, built 1600s. Image courtesy Yellow.Cat distributed under a CC-BY 2.0 license.Fig. 3. Angelo Morbelli (Italian, 1853–1919). Il Natale dei rimasti (Christmas for Those Who Stayed Behind), 1903, oil on canvas, 35 × 55 cm. Venice, Galleria d’Arte Moderna di Ca’ Pesaro. Photo credit: Alinari / Art Resource, NY.Architects were no stranger to the professional virtues of writing by the time of Rossi’s creative formation at midcentury. Modernism was built upon the suppliant interrogatives and commanding imperatives of the manifesto, what Ulrich Conrads pithily referred to as the “critical and revolutionary statements” that negotiated “critical and revolutionary actions.”3 Though the writings of the avant-gardes sought radically different ends—functionalism and anarchical destruction recommended in turn as solutions for political and social problems—the subject position of the author was nearly always collective and disciplinary, even if only in construction. The performative selling power of the manifesto rarely gave way to individual experience.4 Among Rossi’s generation, many favored socioscientific methods and wrote more technical manifestos for increasingly specialized audiences, as seen in Rossi’s own diagrammatic analysis of urban morphology in his first book, L’architettura della città (1965).When the narrative impulse reemerged in the late twentieth century, design discourse often privileged drawing as a kind of text, a site of expression as well as information, rather than writing itself.5 Their often circuitous layers of meaning—like those of Rossi’s well-known sketches of his buildings amid coffeepots and elementary forms—have been understood as a method for disrupting modernism’s totalizing metanarratives, what Jean-François Lyotard derided as that “which orders and explains knowledge and experience.”6 Within this poststructuralist milieu, Rossi’s plea for disorder takes on new resonance. What if it was Rossi’s background in writing, rather than design, that provided him the tools for this rupture? Through his notes and journals, beginning in the late 1960s and culminating with the publication of A Scientific Autobiography in 1981, Rossi engaged in a deceptively simple exercise as a follow-up to his early urban research: he began to write about architecture by writing about himself.This exercise was neither as immediate nor as exclusively literary as it appeared. In the passage above, the origins and layout of the text further complicate its meaning. The book includes photographs, often taken by Rossi himself, inset as image plates in a rhythmic rotation of full bleeds, frames, and artful crops. The image opposite the descriptive passage seems to illustrate it perfectly; light enters from a single window, diffusing throughout the large, richly decorated ecclesiastical space (fig. 4). It exposes itself, however, via the caption, not as Santa Clara at all, but rather as “Synagogue, Pesaro,” perhaps capturing the melancholy feeling of the passage better than the convent itself.7 Comparison with Rossi’s earlier notebooks further shifts the passage’s signification: the text was originally drafted in 1975 in reference to one of Morbelli’s best-known paintings, Il Natale dei rimasti (see fig. 3).8 His editors may have also had a role in this abstraction, having questioned his inclusion of Morbelli, alongside several other outside references, with the annotation “Necessary?” in the illustration list, recommending instead more images of Rossi’s own work.9 The end result is a book that suggests that architecture is both materially bound and somehow freely analogous, the two conditions linked through personal experience. Just as significantly, it suggests a more collective and piecemeal approach to literary production, producing the impression of that personal experience through an exacting editorial process.Fig. 4. “Synagogue, Pesaro.” In Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (1981). Courtesy MIT Press.This essay examines the characterization of writing as an instrument of design in Aldo Rossi’s career. Considering A Scientific Autobiography, it challenges the often repeated assertion that the book was directly drawn from the architect’s notebooks, implying authenticity and directness of voice. Where previous scholarship on Rossi’s oeuvre has skillfully examined its utilization of the literary techniques of repetition, iteration, and collage across writing, drawing, and building, I will attempt to place Rossi’s production within a networked historical context of editorial collaboration.10 Drawing on Rossi’s quaderni azzuri notebooks as well as manuscripts and correspondence held at the Getty Research Institute, my objective is to consider A Scientific Autobiography as a product of material and intellectual practices with his publishing collaborators, in this case at the New York Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. Moreover, my aim is to examine not only the content of Rossi’s writings but also the interrelation between their formats through four distinctly editorial practices—description, transcription, translation, and list making. In focusing attention on these collaborative aspects of the book’s production, this article argues for a shift from a traditional literary framework for reading and situating the production of postmodern architecture.11 By reframing that literary character as intermedial rather than theoretical, Rossi’s dialogue with cultural artifacts can be understood as conditioned by exchanges between an international company of not only other architects and writers but also editors, publishers, translators, and graphic designers. This practice was not unique to Rossi but has often been overlooked as a result of the strongly univocal nature of the designer’s identity in the postmodern period.12 In opposition to this monographic historiography, Rossi’s writing was shaped by a phenomenon that I describe as the editorial impulse, one that I argue mirrored the expanded field of architectural production more broadly.The Italian modernists had developed a highly discursive relationship with writing as an extension of practice. The magazine in particular benefited from a privileged cultural position, as architecture participated in a broader dialogue with the arts and national politics.13 From the 1930s until the 1970s, the writing and editorial leadership of figures from Giuseppe Pagano to Manfredo Tafuri could be found not only in architectural publications like Casabella and Controspazio but also in multidisciplinary leftist organs with a mass readership such as Contropiano and Rinascita. It was under the editorship of Ernesto Rogers at the doggedly retitled Casabella continuità that Rossi began his professional architectural career in 1957, while simultaneously writing on politics and industrialism for the party newspaper La Voce Comunista. His architectural writing consisted primarily of short historical biographies, introductions of international modernists to a Milanese audience. His ten-year editorial experience was a formative one, as it was while writing for Casabella continuità that Rossi developed the interests in historical reference and the modern city that propelled his later design career.Writing also served an undeniably practical purpose for Rossi; his command of language and connoisseurly tone allowed him to disseminate design ideas even within an economically depressed cultural landscape. Postwar stagnation compounded by the 1973 oil crisis produced a seemingly unending lull in development that, as Alex Coles and Catharine Rossi have shown, sent nearly a generation of Italian architecture students onto alternative professional tracks.14 To remain in architecture, as an intellectual and a designer, necessitated reaching a global audience. Rossi’s paper production paid his admission to the elite company of the postmodern literati and the infinitely larger pool of cultural institutions and potential clients to whom they afforded access. Chief among these, for Rossi, would be the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) in New York. Through his friendships with Rafael Moneo and others in southern Europe, Rossi began a dialogue in the late 1960s with the IAUS’s executive director, Peter Eisenman, whose journal Oppositions would work, over the following decade, to remake architectural discourse as a critical, transnational, and deeply autonomous enterprise.15 By 1979, the IAUS had organized an exhibition of Rossi’s models, staged a symposium on his practice, and helped secure him gallery representation at Max Protetch Gallery, all in New York. The institute would eventually purchase publishing rights for L’architettura della città in the United States and agreed, sight unseen, to publish his next book before it was written.16Sometime around 1968, Rossi began to number his personal notebooks. Each slim, stapled volume was meticulously labeled and gathered with the last, the pale blue lot constituting a kind of living archive of the architect’s midcareer emergence. The quaderni azzuri (blue notebooks), as he called them in literal fashion, reflect Rossi’s growing prominence, increasingly filled with ticket stubs and postcards from his international trips to lecture and produce work (fig. 5). Although presented as diaristic, the notebooks also reflect a practice distinct from both the dominant design tool of the sketchbook (which Rossi also kept) and the ephemera of the architectural office. Labeled variously by the city or country in which they were produced, the notebooks and their fragmentary prose—whether oneiric or annalistic—were implicitly tied to travel. The very means of Rossi’s literal, physical dissemination across space provided the source material for the published texts that would do that same intellectual labor.Fig. 5. Aldo Rossi (Italian, 1931–97). Numbered covers of the architect’s quaderni azzuri (blue notebooks), 1968–85. Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, 880319.Rossi’s second book, A Scientific Autobiography, has long been said to have emerged from those journals, suggesting that the text possessed a kind of authenticity or directness based on its extension from a practice of note taking (fig. 6).17 Structurally, an early book review noted a change from the architect’s prior work, whereby the “cool, concise, and well-documented protest against the urban theory of Functionalism” that was L’architettura della città exchanged “History for Memory … [a relationship that] keeps turning up again and again in the Autobiography and which act as a thread throughout the free-association of notes.”18 The reviewer goes on to comment on the strangeness that these notes are not accompanied by “spontaneous sketches,” the expected signifier of architectural thought, but are, rather, “meant to be a self-sufficient text.”19Fig. 6. Front cover. Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (1981). Design by Massimo Vignelli. Courtesy MIT Press.Rossi insists in the introductory pages that the technology of the book functions singularly as an apparecchio, or apparatus.20 He remembers a (deeply Italian) childhood book that shaped this reading, the Jesuit priest Alfonso dei Liguori’s early modern text on Catholic mortality, Apparecchio alla Morte (1737). In an instructive parallel to readers of his own book, he recounts his own encounter with the physical media of the book, extra-small and wide and outfitted with copious engravings, as actively contributing to its meaning.21 He suggests that designers would do well to think of their buildings as extensions of this print logic: as “the instrument which permits the unfolding of a thing.”22 Rossi’s language appears carefully chosen, as the apparatus had emerged as a potent cultural metaphor for structures of control over individual bodies and over society as a whole in the writings of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault.23If the manifesto had been a vehicle for setting projects, and practices, into motion, the autobiography, as reimagined by Rossi, constituted an iterative act of design, aimed at producing a descriptive arsenal of embodied experience. L’architettura della città had focused on urban typologies, an approach that in A Scientific Autobiography was extended to forms of writing. Though he avoids addressing the term autobiography throughout, ruminations on the guidebook as an alternative architectural text abound in both the quaderni and the finished text, providing evidence for a suggestive connection between geography, self, and space making.24 The travel diary had a long history in designers’ education, dating to the Grand Tour and continuing through modernism, as evinced in the preserved writings of Le Corbusier in North Africa and Bernard Rudofsky in Asia and South America. Written travelogues more broadly had taken on an autobiographical quality in the nineteenth century, as the bureaucratic reports of imperial agents gave way to narratives of self-discovery through encounters with the global or colonial other, typified by the adventure writing of Jules Verne. The latter could—crucially—collapse space and time into the form of the novel, engendering a profound sense of personal acculturation in readers even remotely.25 It is within this larger historical trajectory that Rossi’s exploration of autobiography is situated: these developments show how a genre perceived as being so subjective could become the starting point for what he referred to as a deeply methodological, “scientific” project.26DescriptionPerhaps the terms of comparison are always quite personal, and yet without comparison it is difficult to establish any rational description. I am working on many things that are almost juxtaposed, and my daily work is an obstacle to me: I think that, in these notes, I am collecting what I believe to be the connecting thread of my experience.27Analytical thought, for Rossi, began with descriptive writing. Seemingly free from rhetorical posturing, description occupied a privileged position for the designer. He ceaselessly repeated the philosophy of his favorite architect, Adolf Loos, across his notebooks, proclaiming that “great architecture can be described.” This economy with language seemed a natural extension, for Rossi, of Loos’s purist aesthetics, which Pier Vittorio Aureli has suggested the architect associated with his own interest in a distilled vocabulary of architectural forms.28 As a helpful tool for negotiating between text and image, description also played an important role in the transformation of his notebooks into a fully articulated object, as envisioned in collaboration with the IAUS and the office of the graphic designer Massimo Vignelli.29Rossi’s identification with Loos began during his time at Casabella continuità, where he wrote several essays on fin-de-siècle Viennese modernism. During the time that he was working on manuscript edits for A Scientific Autobiography, Rossi’s journals show that he was also completing an introductory essay for a major Italian-language monograph on Loos.30 Like much of Loos’s work, this particular bon mot—“great architecture can be described”—had to do with the pursuit of unyielding intellectual precision within the minimum expression of design, invested here in the exacting signification of language versus image making. In a little-known writing called “On Economy,” the modernist architect claimed that “I have no need whatsoever to draw my designs. Good architecture, how something is to be built, can be written. One can write the Parthenon.”31In Loos’s time this would have been a polemical statement, refuting the long tradition of draftsmanship as the midwife to architectural production. By the structuralist 1970s, however, Loos’s words must have read as prophetic to a designer obsessed with poetry and aphorism as crucial architectural qualities. Rossi wrote in his quaderni that Loos “identified himself with the object through observation and description—without changing, without yielding, and finally, without creative passion, or rather with a sense of being frozen in time.”32 For Rossi, it was technical procedures of architectural drawing that were excessively precise, while the potential syntactic ambiguity and ahistoricism of descriptive writing produced the affective quality he sought. The distinction between writing and drawing was, moreover, eroded in the quaderni, where Rossi reflected in an entry on the nature of handwriting as representation and peppered the pages with loopy, cursive-like scribbles among more formally composed sketches. Descriptive writing was an exercise in discipline, a referencing of the act of creation rather than the production of content as such: “a form of suspension … in which the figure or image is woven together with the text, or in which the handwriting becomes an image … the new is born slowly.”33This vacillation between description and representation structured the book’s editorial processes as well; his closest reader, the translator Lawrence Venuti, responded to the author’s initial manuscript with a long list of suggestions, attempting to clarify and make sense of impervious descriptive passages by pairing them with photographs of the architectural projects they had inspired.34 The architect countered with a cache of photographs, largely of urban sites, landscapes, and monuments in southern Europe so numerous that the IAUS hired a special editorial assistant, Christopher Sweet, to track attributions and secure permissions.35 None of the photographs Rossi provided, however, showed his own projects, nor did he specify the manuscript passages to which the photographs were meant to correspond. Instead, editors Lindsey Stamm Shapiro and Kenneth Frampton would carefully match passages of text to an image they found illustrative, suggesting that the editorial process relied upon description to generate visual meaning. The editors brought these paste-ups with them to the Vignelli office, where the graphic designer and his colleague Abigail Sturgis promptly disassociated text and image once again, setting the photographs at varying scales and orientations on alternating backgrounds and occasionally rephotographing the prints to create the impression that the corners of the three-by-four-inch copies were peeling off the printed page. They worked to break the monotony of the text block into something like a scrapbook or travel album, interspersing photos of the road with southern Europe’s monuments and crumbling infrastructure (fig. 7).Fig. 7. Reinforced stone bridge and seaside construction. From Aldo Rossi, A Scientific Autobiography (1981). Courtesy MIT Press.Description, thus, played a role in editing out the legacy of Rossi’s Italian neorationalist origins. Descriptive passages play the role of observation rather than analysis, and function primarily as a vehicle for self-identification. L’architettura della città had been concerned with urban form as constituted by “real facts, which in turn refer to real experiences,” and was celebrated as groundbreaking scholarship for its systemization of the seemingly incongruous components of the medieval city, from the age-value of building complexes to phenomenological impressions of public spaces, equating a building’s materiality to the spiritual values of its people.36 A decade later, Rossi professed his disdain for this standardizing approach, which sought uniformity among different urban morphologies, as a way of “ignoring the secret feelings I had for these cities.”37 In A Scientific Autobiography, by contrast, great time and care is spent in the recollection and verbal accounting of urban sights of personal significance to the architect—the Milan of his childhood is described as “a confusion of courtyards, suburban houses, roofs, gas storage drums.”38 The reconstitution of those memories, then, begins to emerge as analogous with Rossi’s own signature barrels, cones, and perforated cubes.TranscriptionMy relationship with things, or the desire to know about them, was stronger than the idea of a drawing or a project. Thus, in the apparent copy of a drawing, knowledge emerges as a premise or as a current interest, and the project itself becomes memory. Thus it is not the object, but the project, that becomes memory.39The act of transcription, or rewriting, most closely connects Rossi’s writing and editorial strategies. Mary Louise Lobsinger has written compellingly of the elliptical nature of Rossi’s thought in A Scientific Autobiography as a product of repetition; she argues that the richness, for example, in Rossi’s title comes from its relationship with the Max Planck text from which it takes its name, Planck’s A Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949).40 In repeating Planck’s anecdote on the conservation of energy, she writes, Rossi transforms it from an illustration of an empirical principle to a meditation on death and ambiguity: “the energy it takes to heave a boulder on top of a house remains stored up latent in the block until one day the boulder drops upon an unsuspecting passerby and the inertial energy is unleashed.”41 Building on Lobsinger’s analysis, Rossi’s multilayered references and their development through reading and note taking can be understood as a process of transcription.The long history of transcription as a form of knowledge production offers a better understanding of the dialogical nature of rewriting, as opposed to postmodern historiography’s focus on repetition as an indexical procedure, as derived from semiotic theory and exploited by the conceptualists.42 The former connects Rossi’s practice directly to the hermeneutic tradition more commonly associated with medieval scholarship than the fine arts. It also helps explain how his thought shifts over time from an engagement with other intellectual figures to the elliptical and dialogical nature of his own text, which borrows structural and methodological cues from outside works without paying them direct homage. Alongside Loos, the writers Raymond Roussel and Stendhal also figure prominently in the quaderni, not so much as academic references but as conversations with old friends. Their invocation points to Rossi’s increasing intermediality as much as intertextuality: an ability to see beyond medium specificity to understand how the logic of the one might be borrowed from and applied to the other.43 He shares in the finished text of A Scientific Autobiography his desire to “write about architectural projects, narratives, films, and paintings in a way that is more and more dissociated from their respective techniques, since in this way the creative process would be more closely identified with the thing described and would simultaneously be a projection of reality.”44Transcription also traces Rossi’s career advancement outside of Italy through the repetition and clarification of his ideas by others. No longer working exclusively in the context of the neorationalist circle around Casabella and Controspazio in Milan, which had been formative for his early career, Rossi used his writing to test out ideas in a broader intellectual landscape. The 1967 International Design Conference in Aspen had focused on European design and brought a number of its key figures into contact with Peter Eisenman and the newly founded IAUS. Eisenman, a devotee of Italian design and of Casabella, in particular, cultivated a strong relationship with the “Venice School,” associated with Università Iuav di Venezia, publishing their work and collaborating on a special issue of Casabella with Alessandro Mendini in 1971.45In a letter to Studio Rossi in June of 1979, Eisenman enumerated the many projects in development between the two parties, including an upcoming exhibition and catalog, Aldo Rossi in America, and both his forthcoming books (A Scientific Autobiography and the IAUS-sponsored translation of L’architettura della città), which would be the inaugural titles of the institute’s new imprint, Oppositions Books.46 He stressed that the work must represent a unified intellectual project, and stressed the role that Rossi’s idea of the città analoga might play therein.47 What would become one of Rossi’s best-known intellectual concepts began in 1973 as a series of collaborative paintings and models made for exhibition at the Milan Triennale and Venice Biennale with Arduino Cantàfora, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, and Eraldo Consolascio (fig. 8). Using techniques of collage and assemblage, they referenced the ever-changing nature of the city by combining historically eclectic buildings and other urban artifacts in a spatially improbable array. The approach presented a direct response to the questions of fragmentation and collective memory as design strategies raised by L’architettura della città nearly a decade before. Rossi was reticent to theorize the concept, yet Eisenman’s note suggests that he saw A Scientific Autobiography as doing just that.Fig. 8. Arduino Cantàfora (Italian, b. 1945). La città analoga, 1973, oil on canvas, 200.7 × 701 cm. Milan, Museo del Novecento. Courtesy Arduino Cantàfora.Rossi later reflected on the exchange, writing in his notebook that the editor had understood his work very differently than Rossi had intended it, and in turn produced for him a fresh awareness of his own positions. Eisenman’s introduction to the exhibition catalog for Aldo Rossi in America had qualified Rossi as a “humanist, confronted with a modernism that is not offered to him as a condition of choice.”48 He referred to the Italian fascist architecture that introduced Rossi to the modern style as a child, which implicitly connected his thinking to political and social stakes regardless of his willingness to articulate them. “It now seems to me,” Rossi wrote in response, “that the unquestionable sadness that is found in the emptiness of the Modena cemetery is a historical sadness,” reinscribing the value of “physical symbols of individual life.”49 In his dedication inside Eisenman’s copy of the catalog, however, Rossi subtly but firmly refuted the latter’s insistence on explaining the città analoga in writing: “Dear Peter, architecture and the city can also always represent digressions such as these, rather than the answers to ancient evils. But who can know where we may look for meaning?”50TranslationWhat remains of the architect? Is the architect perhaps left only with the task of being the squalid destroyer of this past, an artificer, devoid of any awareness of the facts at hand, while commanding a firing squad that follows orders from higher up? Perhaps there is something of all this in the
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