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 ALDO ROSSI :

The Architecture
and Art
of the Analogous City

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

February 5 — March 30
2018

DANIEL SHERER 9 Curator

KURT W.  FORSTER 8 Curatorial Consultant
YEHUDA SAFRAN 8 Curatorial Consultant
BRIAN KISH 7 Design Curator
MARTIN KROPAC 7 Exhibition Designer
SCHROETER & BERGER 7 Graphic Design
KIRA MCDONALD 7 Exhibition Coordinator

1
 Preface

MONICA PONCE DE LEON

7 Princeton University School of Architecture
7 Dean and Professor

Thanks are due to SoA Dean Monica Ponce de Leon, to the Fondazione Aldo Rossi Marking the 20th anniversary of his death, this Princeton Exhibition, curated by
for their generous endorsement of the show and to Elise Jaffe  +  Jeffrey Brown for Daniel Sherer, shows how the work of Rossi offers fundamental lessons that as-
their generous support. sume new significance amid contemporary debates. In an era dominated by false
dichotomies, Rossi’s positions are all the more pertinent. Today architecture is
The curator would like to extend a special thanks for their support to: increasingly divided between those who argue for the formal autonomy of the dis-
cipline; and those who advocate for social engagement. Rossi, with his insistence
Alberto Alessi in the formal essentials of architectural types and their role in the formation of
Franklin Boué the city, demonstrated that it is precisely through autonomy that the discipline of
Gianni Braghieri architecture is most culturally relevant. Moreover, by focusing equally on Rossi’s
Preston Scott Cohen theoretical works and his artistic and built forms, Sherer cuts across the recent
Peter Eisenman schism between theory and creative practice, and provides fertile ground for a re-
Massimo Fortis newed discourse on the power of the architectural imagination.
Kurt W. Forster
Frank Gerard Godlewski
Vittorio Gregotti ©
Sebastian Helm
Jacques Herzog
Steven Holl
Jonathan Kirschenfeld
Eduardo Souto de Moura
Vera Rossi
Yehuda Safran
Alvaro Siza
Robert A. M. Stern
Claudia Tinazzi
Carlo Valsecchi
Liz Wendelbo
Laurie Zazenski

This booklet is made possible by the generosity of Elise Jaffe  +  Jeffrey Brown

2 Credits Preface 3
 Aldo Rossi :
The Architecture and Art
of the Analogous City

DANIEL SHERER
9 Princeton University School of Architecture
9 Yale University School of Architecture
9 Curator

“The eye does not see things, but figures of things that signify other things.”
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

The exhibition — the second retrospective of Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) in the

United States since 1979 — offers a new assessment of his achievement on the
20th anniversary of his death.1 Highlighting the role analogy played in his ap-
proach, the show examines diverse domains of inquiry that are connected by this
concept and the wide variety of media (drawing, painting, collage, and engraving)
Rossi mobilized when forging these links. Given this multifaceted contribution,
Rossi reminds us, perhaps more than any other postwar protagonist, of a truism
whose significance is all too often forgotten : namely, that architecture is a funda-
mental part of the system of the arts as it develops over time — a recognition that
presupposes a dialogue (both implicit and explicit) with other areas of aesthetic
experience as a corollary to its partial autonomy.
As to the domains just mentioned in which Rossi was active for some forty
years, from the early 1950s to the late 1990s, these include the theory of the city,
of architecture, and their complex interdependence as distilled in the urban mor-
phologies and typologies that inform his projects; the production and reception
of his drawings, paintings, and prints, which added new material and chromatic
dimensions to the discipline’s repertoire of representations; and, finally, his ac-
tivity as a designer of furniture and objects of daily use, which acquired novel
architectural implications as his typological emphasis was brought down to the
measure of the domestic interior. Binding all of these together is the overarching
theme of the show : the “art” in architecture, a mode of figuration of the built en-
vironment which unfolds in accordance with Rossi’s aspiration to place the dis-
cipline on new theoretical foundations.
Rossi’s work is animated by a tension between this aspiration, epitomized by
fig. 1 © Eredi Aldo Rossi The Architecture of the City (1966) — arguably the only credible theoretical at-
tempt, after Le Corbusier, to unite architecture and urbanism in a grand synthe-
sis — and a need to reduce architecture to its principal linguistic elements. This
need is evident in early works such as the unbuilt Monument to the Partisans at

4 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 5

 fig. 2 Cuneo (1962), a spare Neo-Rationalist composition, and the completed Town
fig. 3 Hall Square and Monument to the Partisans at Segrate (1965), a turning point in
the integration of monumental forms in an urban project. From that moment on-
wards, his conception of architecture will strive to connect what Manfredo Ta-
furi calls “inconceivable extremes” — memory and history, sign and meaning,
the labyrinth of individual subjectivity and the unitary will to found a collective
space. 2 If the first and second are manifest in visual terms in his drawings, paint-
ings, and collages and in verbal ones in the Scientific Autobiography (1984), the
fig. 4 third is exemplified in the housing block at Gallaratese (1967–74), a collabora-
tion with Carlo Aymonino as master planner, and in the Modena Cemetery (1971–
fig. 5 84), designed with the assistance of Gianni Braghieri.
The show presents different phases of Rossi’s itinerary chronologically and
thematically. The chronological part unfolds through a detailed presentation of
his architectural projects in the North gallery, highlighting well-known works
such as Gallaratese (1967–74), the Modena Cemetery (1971–84), and the Teatro
del Mondo (1980) alongside lesser known projects such as the Villa in Borgo Ti-
cino (1973) and the Casa dello Studente in Chieti (1977). The thematic areas of
the exhibition involve protagonists of theory and practice, their relation to institu-
tional and cultural contexts and the possibilities of critical and theoretical reflec-
tion they actualized regarding Rossi’s work as architect, theoretician, and artist.
Taken together, they can help the viewer trace key moments in Rossi’s architec-
tural production and equally important instances of its reception both in Italy and
internationally, culminating with the Pritzker Prize in 1990.
Rossi’s Neo-Rationalist approach effected a radical turn to formal essentials,
emphasizing the interaction of diverse architectural types and their role in the
development of the city. Inspired by his mentor Ernesto Nathan Rogers, his pro-
fessor of architectural design at the Politecnico di Milano and the chief editor of
Casabella Continuità, a number of issues of which Rossi would guest edit and to
which he would contribute over forty essays from 1955 to 1964, Rossi maintained
that externally imposed styles, including that of International Style modernism,
should be be put aside in favor a deeper continuum of memory, experience, and
imagination that traverse all epochs of architectural history, linking them at a
profound level. 3 In this Rossi broke with modernist orthodoxy and its emphasis
on technology and function as privileged sources of structural and formal vocab-
ulary. In his view, typology is the only aspect of the discipline capable of confer-
ring autonomous value on architecture both as a system of classification and as a
matrix of form. In so doing it opens hitherto unrecognized aspects of formal con-
tinuity, even as function alters over time.4
As a result, Rossi effectively replaced Louis Sullivan’s (and the Bauhaus’s) dic-
tum, “form follows function,” with the principle that “form follows type.”5 Due to
this shift, something essential about architecture — something overlooked by or-
thodox modernism — is revealed. Elements of built form, memories of everyday
6 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City
objects and the urban landscape assume new meanings as they enter into un-
expected analogical relationships. This process was explicitly theorized in the
preface to the 1969 Italian edition of the Architecture of the City, only to be fur-
ther elaborated in the 1973 XVI Triennale in Milan and the 1978 preface to the
American edition.
In his theory no less than his practice, Rossi ceaselessly explored these rela-
tionships, recasting familiar typologies while exposing threads of memory that
bind them to each other, to objects of daily life and to the overall morphology of
the city, in an endless signifying chain.6 Re-examining these themes, their sourc-
es in the world of domestic experience and their function as spurs to individual
and collective memory, the exhibition raises new questions about Rossi. To this
end it considers how a typological approach closely tied to the idea of the autono-
my of elemental forms — the triangle, the cube, and the cone, obsessive, stripped
figures that keep recurring in Rossi’s projects — acquires material and percep-
tual density and, together with this, constructional cogency and urban presence,
through the art of the author/architect.7
It is almost as if Rossi were searching for the primordial essence of architec-
ture : a quest that led him to rethink the dialectic of history and memory and its
corollary, the apotheosis of form both monumental and vernacular. The result
was, by the mid-70’s, a unique emptying out of the architectural sign, reducing it
to a sort of “architecture degree zero” whose inner logic and outward appearance
is expressed by the endless reiteration and recombination of a limited number
of typological elements. In this regard Manfredo Tafuri has observed : “In Rossi
the categorical imperative of the absolute alienation of form reigns : to the point
of achieving an emptied sacrality, an experience of the immobile, the eternal re-
turn of geometrical emblems reduced to a ghostly condition.”8
More than any other Italian architect of the postwar period, Rossi engaged
in a dialogue with earlier epochs, always with an eye, however, to the timeless,
the archetypal. This much is evident from his clear commitment to the typologi-
cal principle, taken over from the built forms of Claude Nicolas Ledoux and the
treatises of Étienne Louis Boullée, Antoine Chrysostôme Quatremère de Quin-
cy, and Jean-Nicolas Louis Durand.9 And since Rossi himself defined typology
“the study of types of elements that cannot be further reduced”, one can see how
this branch of architectural knowledge constitutes a formidable tool for examin-
ing the city’s fixed characteristics, or permanenze.
Associated with a wave of typological research that arose within urban stud-
ies in the 1960s in Italy, his return to this particular aspect of the architecture of
the Enlightenment was anticipated by protagonists of typological discourse such
as Giulio Carlo Argan,11 Gianfranco Caniggia,12 Saverio Muratori13 (author of an
exemplary typo-morphological analysis of the urban growth of Venice) and Carlo
Aymonino. These last two figures left an especially deep mark on Rossi. Combin-
ing the approach of Rogers with that of the “typomorphologists”, Rossi acquired
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 7
 a rare historical equanimity : in his view, all eras in architectural history were
pervaded by the same sense of continuity, manifest in the incessant interplay of
type and urban form.15
Kurt W. Forster has characterized this dimension of Rossi in the following way :
“In his search for norms, Rossi confronts the typological schemes of modern ar-
chitecture with their ancient and vernacular counterparts; in his formulation of
an architecture for present conditions, he plumbs the first truly normative con-
cepts that undergird neoclassicism…What he intimates…is the possibility of an
order of things that allows us to experience the present as a suspended moment in
the passage from the past into the future.”16 Like Louis Kahn, whose work he ad-
mired, Rossi looked to history to move beyond history, both through an appeal to a
timeless monumentality and, in his own way, analogically, by eliciting cross-tem-
poral comparisons of urban architecture.17
Analogy was a theme that Rossi came to increasingly investigate with refer-
ence to a climate of thought that grew up around that idea from the 1960s to the
1970s in Italy centering on the writer Italo Calvino, the philosopher Enzo Melan-
dri, the semiotician Umberto Eco and the historian Carlo Ginzburg.18 At this time
of great ferment in Italian intellectual and political life, a critique of inherited
forms or rationality was emerging, and the concept of analogy assumed consid-
erable importance as a bridge between different forms of knowledge. Identifying
similarities or affinities between objects that are otherwise distinct, analogy af-
fected a number of different fields in this period, including philosophy, general
linguistics, semiotics, literature, history, the visual arts and architecture. In this
last field, particularly in connection with its urban dimension, Rossi made his
mark as the most prominent exponent of an analogical approach.
Although we do not have any textual evidence that Rossi came into contact with
this postwar “culture of analogy” by reading Calvino’s Invisible Cities in 1972,
we know for sure that his direct contact with the ultimate source of this author’s
analogism, René Daumal’s Mont Analogue of 1952, was a crucial point of refer-
ence for him most probably by 1968, the year Daumal was published in Italian by
Adelphi, even if he anticipated some of its main sub-themes (the inexorable work-
ings of memory, internal affinities linking objects that are otherwise distinct, in-
tensities of affect attached to similar objects and experiences regardless of dis-
tances of time and space) as early as 1966 in compositional collages combining
diverse architectural and urban precedents.19
In light of the preceding, one can say that although many architects and the-
orists in Italy were actively pursuing typological and typo-morphological inqui-
ries in the 1960s, Rossi was the only figure among his contemporaries to inflect
these inquiries in an analogical direction, thereby lending them an entirely new
significance. Hence if Rogers’s affirmation of continuity set the stage, typo-mor-
phological design and the analogical idea became the main actors in the un-
folding drama of Rossi’s intellectual life and its cultural impact, which was not
8 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City
confined to the worlds of architecture, urbanism and design, but spilled over into
that of art as well. This impact was only augmented from the moment of his first
great theoretical publication of 1966 to the achievement of his fame as a practic-
ing architect with Gallaratese and Modena in the early 1970s. By 1973, the year
of the XVI Milan Triennale “Architettura Razionale” he curated, Rossi had be-
come the chief protagonist and acknowledged head of La Tendenza, a movement
whose impact spread from Italy to affect the direction taken by the newer archi-
tectural languages marked by a typologically rationalized, mnemically charged
emphasis on urban and architectural analogies in cultures as remote as Switzer-
land, Germany, Spain, Portugal, the USA and Japan. 20
In Rossi’s work, analogy is by its very nature not confined to architecture per
se, but extends to the spaces of the city and beyond. It goes hand in hand with ef-
fects of defamiliarization, which paradoxically became the basis for a new kind of
re-familiarization — a taming or acculturation of the strange and new. 21 If he un-
derstood the former in the strict sense of making something that was once famil-
iar or commonplace strange by transposing it to a new context, as is the case with
Canaletto’s alternate vision of Venice cited as a paradigmatic manifestation of
the “città analoga” in the 1976 — preface to The Architecture of the City, where
Palladio’s proposal for the Rialto bridge crops up in a new urban context, he also
grasped its wider implications when comparing a domestic object to an architec-
tural type, as in the colored drawing executed for Alberto Alessi in 1984, where
a tower-like domestic space is magically transformed into an espresso pot. 22 fig.6
While the notion of analogy is exemplified in different ways in these imag-
es, both show that Rossi is removed from any interest in literal or mimetic corre-
spondence. Instead, what is at stake is the intensification of semantic ambiguity
across an entire range of scales, fusing personal and collective memory through
the evocation of architectural types in objects of design. In the end, the defamil-
iarized object takes on new life as part of the domestic scene. The monument is
brought down to earth, or rather, to the surface of the kitchen table; conversely,
the work of architecture, at the urban scale, discloses previously unsuspected af-
finities with everyday utensils and itineraries.
The forms in Rossi’s object-world are instantly recognizable yet ultimately
puzzling. Inscribed in them are latent energies that invite scrutiny of their ev-
er-changing relationships. These belong to a charmed circle of representation
suspended between the oneiric and the actual. In this context Rossi expresses
the idea that concepts of time and space are both particular and universal, con-
nected as they are to the principle of analogy : “The time of analogy measures
both history and memory, similarly the place of analogy refers to a historic place
and memory associated with it”. 23 Rossi further explains the peculiar logic of his
analogical compositions, which make the recalcitrant world of objects into bear-
ers of specific values of memory : “I am referring…to familiar objects, whose form
and position are already fixed, but whose meanings may be changed…Archetypal
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 9
 objects whose common emotional appeal reveals timeless concerns. Such objects
are situated between inventory and memory.”24 In pursuit of these archetypes
Rossi conjures up an atmosphere of familiar and identifiable forms imbued with
unreal qualities, all of which restructure traditional paradigms of aesthetic ex-
pression. In his drawings and prints this objective is simultaneously reached and
re-thematized through an endless series of variations and repetitions, deliberate
manipulations of scale and shifts of context, and a carefully modulated chromat-
icism aided and abetted by dramatic effects of light and shadow.
At this point Kurt W. Forster’s analyses of the implications of analogy in Ros-
si’s work are worth recalling again : “The fate of Rossi’s objects may be fulfilled
in their future role as cenotaphs of our time, but in the present, they stand as bea-
cons for the city. Rossi’s coffee pots shaped like domed towers, and his Teatro del
Mondo tugged through the Venetian lagoon are only two of the phantom vessels
he has launched on the ocean of architectural imagination. They make their ap-
pearance again and again, like mountebanks turning up at every fair, but for the
architect they are “the silence of things repeated or stated for eternity.”25
In Rossi, the more the ideal type approaches realization in a drawing, paint-
ing, engraving, or collage, the more it recalls other conceptual explorations of ty-
pology, or of objet-types; on the other hand, the more the inherited type is actual-
ly realized as construction, the more it acquires precise formal, material, spatial
and functional characteristics, without losing the potential to forge analogical
bonds with other architectures, objects, and experiences. In both cases the artis-
tic dimension of architecture ends up being intensified under the sign of analogy,
which is to say by the dual action of type and memory.
This reading of type through the prism of memory, a theme often associated
with the subjective interpretation of meaning, should not be taken to suggest that
this last was of greatest consequence for Rossi. 26 In his work it is analogy, matrix
of both form and meaning and ultimate source of their possible relationships, that
is at stake, rather than the problem of semantic content as such (whether this is
articulated on the individual or the cultural levels). Here the question of identi-
fying the signified becomes less important than the thematization of the analogi-
cal process itself — a process presupposing the composition, decomposition and
recombination of basic typological elements, in which the ultimate meaning of
the experiment is suspended indefinitely. 27
In Rossi’s hands, then, the typo-morphological approach, reduced to its es-
sence, becomes an allegory of the loss of architecture’s metaphysical and func-
tionalist claims, key to a movement beyond its humanist/classical and high mod-
ernist modalities. Architecture thus recognizes, or if you will, realizes for the
first time, yet also finally, its groundless state; and at the very moment it realiz-
es its artistic aspirations, falls into a new kind of expressionlessness, which does
nothing to preclude its eloquence. Rossi, more than any other 20th century archi-
tect, makes aphasia “speak”. 28 As Tafuri noted, by the mid-to late 70s, for Rossi
10 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City
“representation was everything : it was useless to sorry about secondary mean-
ings in inaccessible realms”. 29 This reading suggests that all modes of represen-
tation — drawing, oil painting, engraving, collage and/or assemblage incorporat-
ing mechanically reproduced elements (Rossi, in the 1970s and 80s, was quite
free with found objects, and acquired the habit of painting and drawing on xe-
roxes) — were fair game for the artist/architect, who, stimulated by the variety of
media at his disposal, cared very little about possible hermeneutic frameworks
or modes of metaphysical meaning that were of greater concern to earlier Italian
artists such as De Chirico, Savinio, Carra, or Sironi.
Indeed, one can go further and say that Rossi’s drawings, no less than his built
works, transform even as they cite a number of diverse codes, whether classical,
historical avant-garde, or Metaphysical. Though he drew on all of these codes
when producing his drawings and pictorial expressions, neither can be reduced to
any one stylistic category. Starting in the 1950’s, he forged his own path between
realism, pittura metafisica, and still life themes and genres linked to the domestic
object-world, not unrelated to Morandi : an apposite prelude for the shifting field
of analogical visuality he would explore from the mid-60s onwards.
This independence of outlook is also manifest in his critical stance towards
conventional categories of purpose in the realm of architectural drawing, which
he understood both on its own terms and in relation to built form. Although in
many of Rossi’s drawings and figurative works, particularly from the late 1960s
to the 1980s, the artist/architect was working out ideas that would subsequent-
ly inform his built work, whether as implicit motivations for the composition and
decomposition of forms or as occasions for exploring the poetics of analogy link-
ing affective states and specific objects.
In other works, no such residual teleology or perceived necessity of the “trans-
lation from drawing and building” is evident.30 Despite their self-enclosed, seem-
ingly hermetic character, there is no justification for viewing Rossi’s drawings
through the somewhat antiquated lens of l’art pour l’art : they cannot really be
considered to be aesthetic ends in themselves, cut off from the rest of the archi-
tectural domain. No body of work as thoroughly informed by analogy as Rossi’s
is ever isolated in this way. And yet they indisputably occupy their own universe
of representation, which includes unique typological solutions finalized in built
forms as well as atemporal expressions of these solutions in drawings.
This loosening of the bonds between purely artistic and technical realization,
or between drawn works and constructed modes of expression, is one of the char-
acteristic features of Rossi’s approach as an artist/architect, and is a corollary
to, or an obverse of, the strengthening and multiplication of analogical bonds be-
tween architecture and the object-world of still life. This is a world that after the
American journeys of the 1970s and 80s, exchanged motives taken from Moran-
di, and De Chirico, for themes and approaches that at times bordered on the im-
agery of Pop Art, as is the case with the Warhol-inspired drawing Gauloises and
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 11
 fig. 7 Coca Cola (1984) from the collection of Gianni Braghieri.31 Yet both processes —
the loosening of the teleological relationship between drawing and building, and
the proliferation of analogies between works of representation and objects — do
not prevent the critic or historian from dividing his works into drawings or relat-
ed modes of figuration on the one hand and built forms on the other.
A good example of the first category of works (those that exemplify Rossi’s ap-
proach to drawing and indeed to figurative artistic form per se) from the early
1970s, is provided by the intense, cloud-like handling of blue and green, evok-
ing the effect of watercolor or wash in the colored drawing for the Villa and Pa-
fig. 8 vilion Project at Borgo Ticino (1973), which typologically speaking, was based
on Rossi’s formal extrapolation from vernacular fishermen’s huts of the Po valley
raised on rustic supports. Here we confront a chromatic vividness which is ob-
tained by mixing pigment with turpentine on the paper or canvas itself (a tech-
nique that Rossi associated with El Greco). 32 In this way the vernacular model
is recalled yet also transfigured by the deft orchestration of chromatic relation-
ships. A good example of the second category of works (those that exemplify Ros-
si’s approach to built form) is seen in the sense of clearly demarcated chromat-
ic fields (acid greens, rust reds) in the gridded facade articulation of the Palazzo
Hotel in Fukuoka, Japan (1989), in which one sees an architectural palette that
is arguably as related to Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s use of architectonic color as it
is indebted to his own love of the intense greens and deep reds in the vernacular
architectures of the region where he grew up around the Lago di Como, Lago di
Lecco, and Lago Maggiore. 33
Thus, as far as Rossi’s use of a variety of media is concerned, one can say that
his artistic freedom becomes most evident in his willingness to let the power of
chromaticism overstep the boundaries of firm design in drawing and figurative
art. A different kind of mastery is seen in the need to keep chromatic relation-
ships within the strict boundaries set by the articulations of load and support and
the typological elements associated with them in his built projects.
Even as Rossi’s artistic representations of typological ideas diverge from the
constructed manifestations of the latter, the artistic representations and the built
forms enter into second-order analogical relations of their own. In all cases how-
ever, the ideal as well as the perceptual characteristics of Rossi’s architecture are
illuminated by the analogical bonds it forged with other aspects of experience that
lie outside of architecture. Analogy thus gave Rossi a way to relate architecture
to the non-architectural. On more than one level, for Rossi, analogy is a figure of
thought which mediates between the inside and outside of architecture, both in a
physical and an epistemological and/or disciplinary sense.34
In his artistic universe, built forms are not only compared to design objects;
they are aligned with them at an essential level, reduced to the same common de-
nominator, despite real differences. Even Rossi’s predilection for still life, under-
scored by his attachment to genre scenes showing a restricted number of domestic
12 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City
objects in their fixity, is simultaneously recalled and transformed by ludic qual-
ities that border on a childlike perception of the world. This last is related to the
willed naivete of a Paul Klee yet is also not untouched by a dark side, insofar as
Rossi’s drawings are often suffused with a sense of melancholy manifest in the
allied themes of disorder, the fragment and repetition. 35
Given the pervasive role played by analogy in his oeuvre, and the multiple
cross-references and points of interference it generates between built form, aes-
thetic experience and affective response, every work of Rossi can be considered
to be, at one and the same time, part of a larger artistic project which is architec-
tural through and through yet also wholly “art”, part of the realm of artistic ex-
pression in the widest sense. 36 This, more than any particular way of approach-
ing theoretical problems, or any predisposition to typo-morphological discourse,
clearly sets him apart from his contemporaries; it allows him to establish a com-
pelling dialogue with the present, at a point when the conversation between the
arts and architecture is attaining a new actuality.
Moreover, due to his consistent emphasis on analogy, Rossi traced threads of
memory that bind architecture to objects of daily life and to the highly stratified
nature of the urban phenomenon. This process, which Rossi identified with an-
alogical recurrence, gives the architect the ability to rediscover the past in the
present and to prepare the way for the future through the construction of the city.
Analogy, on this view, applies equally to architecture’s production and reception,
and for this reason can be seen as a key to the immanent ensemble of readings of
the urban configuration that co-exist at any given moment. For Rossi, then, anal-
ogy and memory are two sides of the same coin, as are type and morphology. 37
Renewed attention on Rossi’s work casts an unexpected light on the architec-
tural present, at a time when the discipline is torn between extremes of techno-fe-
tishism, a willingness to cede its partial autonomy to market forces, and a spe-
cious naturalism : diverse ideological compromises that have effectively elided the
solid link between architecture and memory and the indispensable commitment
to the artistic status of form that are key to the continuing vitality of the discipline.
Rossi opens new doors to a radical critique of these compromises by stressing the
deep temporality of architectural type, the principle of analogy linking built form
to the world of objects at different scales, and perceptions of space that only ar-
chitecture can offer. In this way analogy became for him the essential corollary
of autonomy, which may be defined as architecture’s ability to rise above any cir-
cumstance or set of forces that would deny its margins of artistic freedom and its
potential dialogue with the other arts.
Rossi understood that the tension mentioned earlier between the attempt at re-
foundation aimed at achieving greater autonomy for the discipline and the need
to return to a sort of “architecture degree zero” ended up yielding a recognition
of the impossibility of this project. This recognition had the effect of revalorizing
architecture as representation while suspending it in an uncertain realm between
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 13
 construction and image. Rossi is thus caught in an insuperable paradox. On the
one hand, he is spurred on by the impulse to renew the discipline by reinventing
its theoretical instruments; on the other he is afflicted by the painful awareness
that it is impossible to do that, in the absence of any metaphysical certainties,
since secularization processes identifiable with the onward rush of modernity
have removed them for good. As a result, as Tafuri noted, “The thread of Ariadne
with which Rossi weaves his typological research does not lead to the reestab-
lishment of the discipline, but rather to its dissolution.”38
Here one can discern beneath the disciplinary dream of autonomy the con-
tours of a darker definition of architecture based on the pars destruens : an invert-
ed analogue of the positivity pursued by the scientific Rossi that is essential to
the melancholic inspiration of Rossi the artist.39 For this reason, the threshold of
scientificity that Rossi is constantly attempting to traverse always leads him back
to the labyrinth of analogism : here, as elsewhere, to paraphrase Enzo Melandri,
the (straight) line forward is bent back into a circle, breaking any directionality
or linear progress. This self-referential spiral mixing production and destruc-
tion is seen in many of his works, but above all in L’architecture assassinée, a
hand-painted etching executed in 1975 for Tafuri which now is on the cover of the
American edition of Architecture and Utopia, showing an emblematic sample of
fig. 9 his own architectures crumbling to pieces.40 Here architecture is not only shown
to be a physical ruin about to happen, but also to be caught up in a pathetic con-
dition of disciplinary and theoretical baselessness.
When faced with this etching, one cannot imagine a more exact analogical
equivalent of Tafuri’s “project of crisis” : that is, the theorization of an architec-
ture caught between a need to construct new epistemological premises and the
painful discovery that the foundations are rotten to the core, and hence that no act
of re-grounding is possible. This image, at once ludic and alarming, metonymi-
cally evokes the crisis affecting contemporary architecture even as it traces a spe-
cific journey through constructed space : one that is not only applicable to Rossi’s
architectural autobiography and his trajectory through his own time but to our
own as well. That this evocation unfolds in ways that might still elude our con-
scious understanding, but which nonetheless remain at work in the deeper recess-
es of our architectural knowledge, only shows how profoundly Rossi has entered
into our vision, as well as the imaginary, of the discipline, shaping it from within.
© 10 Rossi, Architecture of the City, cit., 41; M. de Michelis, “Aldo Rossi and Autonomous Archi-
14 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City
1 Peter Eisenman, “The House of the Dead and the City of Survival,” in Aldo Rossi in America:
1976 to 1979, ed. K. Frampton (New York: IAUS Catalogue 2, 1979), 4-15.
2 M. Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture 1944–1985 (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press,
1989), 139.
3 B. Lampariello, Aldo Rossi e le forme del razionalismo esaltato (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2017);
C. Olmo, “Across the Texts The Writings of Aldo Rossi,” Assemblage 5 (February 1988): 91–121.
A representative selection of these essays are collected in A. Rossi, Scritti Scelti sull’architettura
e sulla città 1956–1972, edited by R. Bonicalzi (Milan: CLUP 1978).
4 Rossi, Architecture of the City, translated by Diane Ghirardo with an introduction by Peter
Eisenman (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1982).
5 I owe this formulation to Morris Adjmi.
6 Speaking of his first visit to New York, Rossi exemplifies his own analogical obsession and meth-
od: “The meaning of the title of this catalogue [Aldo Rossi and America], chosen by Peter Eisen-
man and signifying my relationship with America, perhaps is not very apparent in the designs —
only in the urban backgrounds of some them where the “two towers’ emerging form the Lombard
fog with memories of Filarete, mix with the towers of New York and elsewhere. The little houses of
Chieti merge with the banks of Elba and little American houses on the vast terrain from the north-
east to the south. These insertions or analogies are the America that I rediscovered from Maine to
Paranà; and it may be too, that in America I like the way a long forgotten model tends to be repeat-
ed.” Aldo Rossi, “Introduction,” to Aldo Rossi in America, cit., 3.
7 Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, cit. 136.
8 Ibid., 136–9.
9 The first of these authors stands out as the subject of one of Rossi’s most important readings of
Enlightenment architecture — one which contained indications regarding his own theoretical po-
sition, more than purely historical analysis: see Rossi, “Introduzione a Boullée,” Architecture,
Essai sur l’art (Padua: Marsilio, 1967), reprinted in Rossi, Scritti scelti, ed. Bonicalzi, cit., 346–
64. On this text and its importance for Rossi’s own architectural and theoretical development see
M. Bandini, “Aldo Rossi,” AA Files 1(1981–1982), 106–111; P. V. Aureli, The Possibility of An
Absolute Architecture (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 2011), chapter 4; Aldo Rossi, cit., ​
tecture,” in The Changing of the Avant-Garde: Visionary Architectural Drawings from the How-
ard Gilman Collection., ed. T. Riley (New York: MOMA, 2002), 89-98.
11 G. C. Argan, “Sul concetto di tipologia architettonica,” in Progetto e Destino (Milan 1965)
12 G. Caniggia, Composizione architettonica e tipologia edilizia (Rome, 1981).
13 S. Muratori, Studi per una storia operante di Venezia (Rome, 1960).
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 15
 14 C. Aymonino, Il Significato delle città (Padua: Marsilio, 1965); and in AAVV, La formazione
del concetto di tipologia edilizia (Venice,1965); Rapporti tra tipologia edilizia e morfologia ur-
bana (Venice, 1966)
15 It would be unjustifiably schematic to see “the typo-morphologists” as a monolithic bloc. In
fact, notable divergences in their approaches are evident: Argan stressed the destiny of rational-
ity in the Occidental urban configuration and its histories, using type as a means of interrogating
this theme; Muratori and his discipline Caniggia espoused a more pragmatic and technical out-
look; and finally Aymonino — like Rossi himself — elaborated a method that is at once compre-
hensive and operative, insofar as they both sought out a mode of analysis that “by placing different
processes in relation to each other, also allowed one to forecast urban issues”: Aymonino, Origini
e sviluppo della città moderna (Padua: Marsilio, 1965), 54.
16 Kurt W. Forster, “Aldo Rossi’s Architecture of Recollection: The Silence of Things Repeated
or Stated for Eternity”, Essay for Pritzker Prize 1990, Aldo Rossi Laureate.
17 On Rossi and Kahn, see Lamporiello, Aldo Rossi, cit., 85, n. 26. Rossi discovered Kahn’s work
in the pages of Casabella in the early 1970s. “Kahn……è stato forse l’unico architetto vivente chi
mi aveva interessato nel senso dello stesso interesse per l’architettura,” Getty Research Center, Los
Angeles, Aldo Rossi papers, box 9/146. Lamparielllo is correct to speak of Kahn’s attempt to re-
alize architectural works the synthesis models form the pass with innovation, as having a cultural
program analogues to that undertaken by Rossi in the same years.
18 The key texts that attest to this climate are Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities; Enzo Melandri, La
linea e il circolo: studio logico-filosofico sull’analogia (Bologna, Il Mulino, 1968), ; Umberto Eco,
“Un saggio di Melandri. Descartes nella Trappola,” L’Espresso (May 30, 1969); C. Ginzburg,
“Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths and the Historical Method. Translat-
ed by John and Anne Tedeschi. (Baltimore/London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 96-
125, esp. n. 43. On the development of this climate and its attitudes towards analogy see P. Ano-
tonello, “The Myth of Science or the Science of Myth. Italo Calvino and the Hard Core of Being,”
Italian Culture (18 July 2013), 71–91; G. Agamben, “Archeologia di un’archeologia,” in E. Melan-
dri, La linea e il circolo. Studio logico-filosofico sull’analogia (Quodlibet, Macerata, 2004), xiff;
G. Marramao, “Logos e esperienza. Rileggendo “La linea e il circolo”, in S. Besoli e F. Paris, Stu-
di su Enzo Melandri. Atti della giornata di studi. Faenza, 22 maggio 1996, (Polaris, Faenza 2000).
19 Yet, even if there is no textual evidence for Rossi’s reading of Calvino’s Invisible Cities, there
is oral evidence: Frank Godlewski, in conversation with the author, has affirmed that he had long
discussions with Rossi on Calvino at some point in the 1970s (though this particular novel is not
cited). Indeed, it would be almost impossible for Rossi not to have known of, or read Calvino, giv-
en the fame of that author. See for Rossi on Daumal, 116-7, where he describes his reading of this
text, which was published for the first time in Italian in 1968, as “una lettura di incredible im-
portanza” and connects the French utopian novel to the mystical writings of St. John of the Cross
and to the ideal city described in Plato’s Republic. On Daumal, see C. Rigafori, “Di tuna certez-
za,” in R. Daumal, Il Monte Analogo (Milano: Adelphi, 1968), 142–82. On the development of
the idea of analogical architecture and the città analoga in Rossi, see P. Eisenman, “The Hous-
es of Memory“, cit., Lampariello, Aldo Rossi, cit. 272–75 (on the analogical collages of 1966); G.
Poletti, L’autobiografia scientifica di Aldo Rossi. Un’indagine critica tra scrittura e progetto di ar-
chitettura (Milan, 2011).
20 On Rossi as an exceptional “case” insofar as had become the head of the Tendenza, even be-
fore the XVI Triennale, see Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, cit. 135; Marco de Michelis,
“Aldo Rossi and Autonomous Architecture,” cit.; on its international reception, J. Louis Cohen,
“ La coupure entre architectes et intellectuels, o les enseignements de L’Italophilie,” In Exten-
so, I, École d’Architecture Paris-Villemin, (Paris 1984) a. (period)
16 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City
21 A. Rossi, La Conica, La Cupola e altre Caffettiere (Milan, 1988), 8. This dialectic of famil-
iarity and defamiliarization is evident above all in his approach to the analogical implications of
design. And in this context it is significant that the interest in analogy, for Rossi, extends to lan-
guage as well: Rossi makes the connection “between a form and its denomination” in the case of
La Conica, which he contracts as “laconica” (laconic), as a clue to the spare, austere form of the
coffee pot itself.
22 Rossi, The Architecture of the City, cit., 164–7; Alberto Alessi, “Aldo Rossi e il Design,” Of-
ficina Alessi, Catalogo (Verona, 2014), 64-72.
23 Rossi, “An Analogical Architecture,” Architecture and Urbanism 56 (1976) –74–76.
24 Ibid. loc. cit.
25 Kurt. W. Forster, “Tempi (di vita) e memoria (giovanili) nei luoghi di Aldo Rossi,” in La Lezi-
one di Aldo Rossi, ed. A. Trentin (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2008), 173.
26 Cf. Eisenman, “The Houses of Memory,” cit., 3ff.
27 E. Bonfanti, “Elementi e costruzione. Note sull’architettura di Aldo Rossi,” Controspazio II, 10
(1970), 19-28, reprinted in Bonfanti, Scritti di architettura, ed L. Scacchetti, (Milano, 1981),281-
296; G. Poletti, L’Autobiografia Scientifica di Aldo Rossi (Milan: Bruno Mondadori, 2011), 126.
28 Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, cit, 137–8; The Sphere and The Labyrinth: Avant-Gar-
des and Architefture from Piranesi to the 1970s. Translated by Pellegrino d’Acierno and Robert
Connolly (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 1990), chapter 8.
29 Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, cit., 138.
30 R. Evans, Translations from Drawing to Building (Cambridge, MA/London: MIT Press, 1997).
31 G. Braghieri, “Tower, Coca-Cola and Gauloises. The relationship between Art and Architec-
ture in Aldo Rossi,” Architecture & Arts 1900/2004: A Century of Creative Projects in Building,
Design, Cinema, Painting, Photography, and Sculpture, ed. G. Celant, Milan 2004, p. 452. For
other instances of Rossi’s interest in Pop Art, see the exhibition design of the 1964 Triennale, see
the Lampariello, Aldo Rossi, cit., 188ff.
32 Frank G. Godlewski, conversation with the author.
33 Rossi, Autobiografia scientifica, cit., 11–35; cf. Lampariello, Aldo Rossi, cit., chapter 1 (on his
youth on the laghi). For Rossi on Schinkel, see Rossi, Architecture of the City, cit., 76, 78, 79, 114,
135, 171. Rossi pays particular attention to Schinkel’s proposal for a royal palace on the Acrop-
olis of 1834 (p. 135), shown in black and white in his study. Yet he would have been aware that
Schinkel (who knew of Semper’s theses on classical polychromy, as Schinkel had seen his poly-
chrome drawings in 1833), and who started his career as a painter, would have made provision for
a multi-chromatic interior. Schinkel was “enthralled in those years (the 1830s) with the use of ar-
chitectural polychromy:” see H, F. Mallgrave, Gottfried Semper: Architect of the Nineteenth Cen-
tury (New Haven/London, Yale U. P., 1996), 53ff. Schinkel’s interest in certain colors (the red of
the Charlottenhof interior in Potsdam; the red, black and gold of the Great Hall in the Acropo-
lis project) was stimulated by the frescoes of the Pompeiian second and third styles, which he had
seen in 1804 soon after their discovery by Karl Weber which coincided with his Italian journey:
see Ian Boyd White, “Charlottenhof: The Prince, the Garden, the Architect, and the Writer,” Ar-
chitectural History 43 (2000), 3–4; C. Parslow, Rediscovering Antiquity: Karl Weber and the ex-
cavation of Herculaneum, Pompeii, and Stabiae (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 17
 34 Here a passage from Augustine’s Confessions that caught the eye of the young Rossi is perti- 40 See Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia: Design and Capitalist Development (Cambridge/London,
nent, as it describes an “absolute place without height, breadth or width, a place of a complete loss MIT Press, 1976), 179-81, and fig. 36.; History of Italian Architecture, cit., 129. cf. P. Eisenman,
of self without end.” (Aldo Rossi, Agostino, note manoscritte, 1948-1949, Fondazione Aldo Ros- “The House of the Dead and the City of Survival,” cit., 4: “This drawing [sic], made in 1975 and
si, Milan, p. 1-7, 7, into Lampariello, Aldo Rossi, cit., 20, n. 15; cf Augustine, Confessions, I, 22.) dedicated by Rossi to Tafuri, has several levels of significance. On the most obvious level it is a vi-
Such musings anticipate Rossi’s observations on Alberti in the Autobiografia Scientifica, espe- sion of the city today and description of the society which brings about that vision. It is similar to
cially in connection with the Tempio Malatestiano and S. Andrea, works “che non puo modificarsi the “deconstructions” of Piranesi, which in Tafuri’s assessment exhaust the choses for architecture
e che insieme riassume il tempo”. Forster, in the essay cited earlier, “Tempo (giovanile),” cit., 71, in the futrue. On another level, it is both a private commentary on Tafuri’s “end of architecture” and
contrasts these observations to the stairway at Fagnano Olona, which reminds us that time can- public denial of that pronouncement.” This eloquent analysis captures the tension between col-
not stand still, even if great works of architecture like Alberti’s make us think it can, as the clock lective and individual referents and readings admirably. And yet, it is as much evidence of Eisen-
placed on axis at the summit of the stairs, indicates. The clock, for Rossi, as is well known from his man’s (and a prevalent) misreading — as well as an important perception of how things seemed at
meditations on this device in the Autobiografia, thus acquires an analogical function, both as re- the time — of an imputed apocalyptic strain in Tafuri’s thinking which was actually not there, as
gards temporality and its own architectural context. One could just as easily call this function fig- he was against all teleological readings, apocalyptic ones included. See my earlier analysis of the
ural. In that case one should compare the insights of Erich Auerbach, in “Figura,” in Scenes from anti-teleological mode of thought, based on readings of eclipse rather than destruction, and hence
the Drama of European Literature translated by Ralph Manheim (Minneapolis, 1984), esp. 36-47, of cycles of architectural renewal and destruction, in “Preface” to Tafuri, Interpreting the Renais-
who noted that Augustine, who was part of an exegetical tradition linking  figura and typus, stands sance: Princes, Cities, Architects (New Haven/Cambridge, MA: Yale University Press/Harvard
at the origin of the idea of a temporal foreshadowing, of things that lie outside of time, as when the GSD Publications, 2006), xvi. It would seem, then, from this perspective, that one can insert this
city of man is divided from, yet also foreshadows the city of God. This leads us back not only to image, playful as well as unsettling, within this ambivalent vision of a cyclic history of architec-
Rossi, who seems to have perceived the link between analogical/figural discourse and typological ture, even if one could also read it as a simple hommage to a historian who for many seemed to en-
discourse partly due to his own early readings of Augustine, but also to Calvino, who observed, in vision the “end” not only of an “era” (the modern) but of architecture itself. Tafuri himself sees the
Invisible Cities, “one does not see things in themselves but only figures that refer to other things”: homage as quite possibly being both ironic and polemical, even if it presents Rossi’s dreams “in a
words that embody a mode of “analogical perception” that reveal a fundamental affinity between state of collapse” (History of Italian Architecture, cit., 129). On Tafuri’s commitment to the idea
his own literary project, the theological project of the Church Father in the Confessions and Ros- of “eclipse” rather than definitive end or eschaton of the discipline, see the magisterial statement,
si’s project of architectural thought and personal memory in the Autobiografia. to which he adhered throughout his career, in chapter 1 of Theories and History of Architecture
35 Cf. Tafuri, History of Italian Architecture, cit., 137-8. (London, 1980) and the critique of teleological histories in the interview with Richard Ingersoll,
“There is No Criticism, Only History”, Casabella 620/621 (1995), 98.
36 “The writer Aldo Rossi, the painter Aldo Rossi, and the architect Aldo Rossi are non-exis-
tent. I simply regard these various aspects as a unity (as do all artists, in my opinion), and I there-
fore particularly enjoy opportunities where I can express myself as technician, artist and writer.”
“A Conversation: Aldo Rossi and Bernard Huet,” in Aldo Rossi Architect ed. H. Geisert (London:
Academy Editions, 1994), 15.
37 In this connection Sam Jacoby’s analysis is pertinent: “The fragmentary reflections in the Sci-
entific Autobiography are intended to explain the problematic relationship between factual and fic-
tional readings of architecture.…The conflation of the subjective and objective is a form of analy-
sis signifying to Rossi the meaning of ‘scientific’. He detects — in a Freudian slip — in Planck’s
writings but also Dante’s Commedia a scientific and autobiographic search for death and happi-
ness, which he interprets as a ‘continuation of energy’, which in architecture reveals itself by the
fact that: ‘In the use of every material there must be an anticipation of the construction of a place
and its transformation.’…This double reading of architecture justifies the contrasting of individ-
ual themes with permanent architectural themes through analogies, resulting in a reflective rep-
etition and variation of the same. Rossi’s biographical experiences, associations, and insights
accordingly are meant to present archetypal forms as memories in which objects, history, and bi-
ography unite.” S. Jacoby, The Reasoning of Architecture. Type and the Problem of Historicity.
PhD TU Berlin, 2015, 259.
38 Tafuri, “Per una critica dell’ideologia architettonica,” Contropiano 1 (1969), 133.
39 Here we may recall that it is no accident that analogy has come to be as constituting a natural
bridge or form of mediation between scientific and artistic inquiry, in keeping with Melandri’s in-
sight that it functions in a more general sense as a natural bridge or form of mediation between di-
verse fields of knowledge: Melandri, La linea e il circolo, cit.​

18 Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City 19
 fig. 4 © Eredi Aldo Rossi

fig. 2 © Eredi Aldo Rossi

fig. 5 © Eredi Aldo Rossi

fig. 3 © Eredi Aldo Rossi

20 Images Images 21
 fig. 6 © Eredi Aldo Rossi

fig. 9 © Eredi Aldo Rossi

fig. 1: Aldo Rossi standing on Parthenon steps. Photography by Gianni Braghieri. Athens, 1971.
fig. 2: AR, Monument to the Partisans (1962), Cuneo, from Casabella (1963).
fig. 3: AR, Monument to Partisans and Town Square, Segrate, (1964).
fig. 4: AR and Carlo Aymonino, Gallaratese Housing Complex (1967–1974). Photo by S. Topuntoli
fig. 5: AR with G. Braghieri, Modena Cemetery (1971)
fig. 6: AR, drawing for Alessi, Il Ritorno dalla Scuola (1984)
fig. 7: AR, Gauloises and Coca Cola (1984)
fig. 8 © Eredi Aldo Rossi fig. 8: AR, Drawing of Borgo Ticino Villa (1973)
fig. 9: AR, L’architecture assassinée (on cover of M. Tafuri, Architecture and Utopia (1976),
fig. 7 © Eredi Aldo Rossi hand-painted etching, 1975

22 Images Images 23
 Schematic plan by Martin Kropac, 22.1.2018

24

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