K.

MICHAEL HAYS: The late 20th-century architect Aldo Rossi

was very taken with this aphorism of Loos.
We can almost imagine Rossi presenting his own architecture
and making a similar claim.
"That is architecture."
Let's take a look at a first project by Rossi.
It's an unbuilt monument to the Italian partisans.
These were the fighters who were against the fascist government
in Germany and also the fascist government in Italy
and against the sort of axis that brought Italy
into contact with the Nazis.
It's in a little town called Cuneo, which is in the northern part of Italy.
It's a cube, 12 meters, open to the sky, and it
has these very steep steps ascending up into what is a relatively small room.
It has the effect of being thought of as a kind of urban room,
because it's situated at the edge of the city in a very
precise relationship to a piazza.
When you see the elevation, the first thing you notice
is a blank surface, which is held by very, very thin corners of concrete--
so thin that the surface appears to be floating
and the steps ascend up behind the surface.
As you move into the room, first onto the steps,
there's an almost oppressive weight of this giant 12 meter cube hovering over
you.
But then when you get to the room, though it's relatively small,
it opens up to the sky.
There's no roof.
And at first, the perception would be that you only see the sky.
And then you notice a very small, very narrow sort of strip of a window.
And because of the way the cube is sited in the city, at the edge of the city,
the window looks out onto the fields and into these spectacular mountains
just outside of Cuneo which in a way is the territory that the partisans were
fighting for.
Like Loos's mound, Rossi's monument has a lot of sensuous associations.
It's a very intense experience of ascent, enclosure, and then view.
There are other encrustations or associations.
There are many, many references to modern architects like Loos himself,
like Giuseppe Terragni, like Le Corbusier that someone
familiar with architectural history would also notice these references.
But again, like Loos, the real object, which Rossi
called an architectural type--
the real object withdraws from our experience.