“Alcuni dei miei progetti”: Aldo Rossi and the Editorial Impulse

Abstract

133 The 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 Ceme tery (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: