EL PERIODO CLÁSICO DEL ANÁLISIS DE LEGIBILIDAD (1900-1950)

Italian modernism. One such reaction took form in the escapist aesthetic

of the neoliberty style, referring to Italy’s ties to England in the late nineteenth century and adopting the name “Liberty” after the English manufacturer of Art Nouveau fabrics. Neoliberty called for a return to patterned fi guration, evoca-tive materiality, and a type of softness to counter both the harshness of modernist abstraction and the overblown imperial scale of Italian fascism.

A second reaction was manifest in Italian neorealist fi lm of the same period. Neorealism is a term derived from literature and fi lm and, when extended to architecture, refl ected the climate of the Italian liberation and its turn away from modernist abstraction. A documentary attention to everyday life and an abundance of details were among the mimetic techniques used to produce the “realistic” effects of neorealism. Neorealism involved a double mimesis in architecture. For example, the rebuilding of the Tiburtino district in Rome during the early 1950s produced build-ings that were new by necessity but also needed to resemble the product of historical sedimenta-tion. This mimicking of historical forms resulted in an architecture whose neorealist effect was

2. Central Business District proposal, Turin, 1962 . 3. Study for the Segrate Monument, 1967.

marked by a nostalgic quality. This was coun-tered by another form of realist thought which worked against the grain of neorealism’s descrip-tive effects. Rossi’s concept of realism departs from neorealism’s humanist values, as Pier Vittorio Aureli describes in discussing the terms of Rossi’s “realist education,” and turns a new critical attention to what Rossi considered to be the “facts” of the city. In his early work and writings, Rossi initiates a critique of the sceno-graphic effects of neorealism by pointing toward a more structuralist notion of realism in archi-tecture that is grounded in typological studies.

Rossi’s critique of the modernist canon—of both the abstractions of late modernism and the mon-umentality of fascist Italy—could be considered most evident in his drawings and his important fi rst book, The Architecture of the City, published in 1966. The Cemetery of San Cataldo at Modena, and perhaps to a similar degree his Gallaratese housing complex, are among the few of Rossi’s realized buildings in this period that integrate his critique of abstraction with his interest in typol-ogy, analtypol-ogy, and scale.

4. Gallaratese 2, Milan, 1969–73.

Another critique of modernism in architec-ture was represented at the time by the maga-zine Casabella, which, under Ernesto Rogers’

direction, included many of Rossi’s early articles on Adolf Loos and Louis Kahn, as well as on mod-ernist buildings such as Mies’s Seagram Building and Le Corbusier’s La Tourette. In addition to critical writings, Rossi’s early work as an archi-tect included his participation in several competi-tions. The most famous of these was the project for a regional government center in Turin, which consisted of a giant four-sided square, a mega-building on giant columns spaced 100 meters apart with a vast square courtyard in the center.

Rossi placed this massive form outside of the city of Turin as a new kind of over-sized civic marker.

In the Turin project, as well as in competition projects for monuments in Cuneo and Segrate, the juxtaposition of scales becomes an important theme. These early works also deploy pure geo-metrical forms—circles, isosceles triangles, and squares—which are extruded to form cylindri-cal, cubic, and triangular structures. The cubic form of his Turin project and the extruded

trian-gular form on a circular column for his Segrate Monument to the Partisans exemplify his interest in forms reduced to their geometric archetypes.

Such forms would reappear in the Cemetery of San Cataldo competition in different guises.

Rossi published The Architecture of the City before any of his work had been built, much like Robert Venturi’s publication of Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture, published the same year, before Venturi completed any major built work. Venturi and Rossi also shared an interest, new at the time and expressed in the-oretical postulates, in describing the irreducibil-ity of the cirreducibil-ity to any of modernism’s totalizing visions. Yet, where Venturi’s populist embrace of the city and its hallmark strip includes its tem-porary signage in the city’s symbolic language, Rossi instead adopts an analytic method to iso-late what he considered the city’s urban arte-facts. Such urban artefacts include elements of the city whose continuities, be they functional, such as housing, or symbolic, such as monuments, account for their permanence within the history of the city. In Rossi’s analysis, these artefacts can

6. Courtyard and tower, Fagnano, 1973. Detail.

also be considered catalysts for new buildings.

This dialectic of permanence and growth defi nes Rossi’s understanding of the city as occupying different moments in time and suggests that the urban artefact records diachronic moments and histories.

As one of the books that was critical in rethinking the relationship of architecture and the city, Rossi’s The Architecture of the City shares some similarities with Colin Rowe’s book Collage City, fi rst published in 1978, yet it is their differences that are important. A fundamental premise of Collage City is that what existed—the buildings embodying the history of architec-ture—had an intrinsic value and could be consid-ered truthful as well as foundational. Rowe gave a value to origin, and therefore any urban project had to respond to these pre-existing or, in Rowe’s terms, “set pieces” of the city. In Collage City, Rowe selected such set pieces, like a rotunda or a

square or even a mega-building like the Hofburg in Vienna, and inserted them into other contexts in a strategy that resembles Piranesi’s Campo Marzio project. Rowe’s idea of set piece, taken out of its original context and reinserted into a new context, linked contextualism to the idea of collage. Yet Rowe’s and Piranesi’s strategies differ in respect to the value of origins. Whereas Rowe assigns an a priori value to what exists and adds structures to reinforce this concept, Piranesi assigns no value to the existing context and creates set pieces with no a priori context as a grounding idea. Rowe’s method of collage reuses preexisting meaningful fragments, while Piranesi maintains the juxtaposition of elements without being beholden to an idea of the whole. Rossi’s approach could be likened to that of Piranesi in terms of retaining a tension between urban ele-ments, denying a singular narrative, meaning, or origin. Instead of set pieces, fragments, or 5. Domestic Architecture with Monuments, 1974.

7. For Peter Eisenman, 1978. Detail. 8. Studio, 1980.

collaged elements of the city, Rossi conceived of the city as an ensemble of typological elements, whose simple geometries could be read as the result of removing their layers of historical accre-tions. The process of reduction is identifi ed in Rossi’s typological analysis as the study of types of urban elements distilled to their most simple geometric form. This produced geometric fi gures with a level of fi guration unlike the abstract entities of modernism and unlike the contextual character of Rowe’s urban fragments. In this operation, Rossi rethought the entire notion of typology developed in the nineteenth century by J.N.L. Durand as a series of type conditions for certain buildings. Rossi was perhaps the fi rst postwar architect to reintroduce the notion of typology in architecture. In attacking the tradi-tion of typology related to functradi-tion as well as to the formal, Rossi used type as an analytical instrument with which to generate form as well

as to generate a critique of modernist abstrac-tion. He reintroduced instead a typology which dealt not only with the problem of scale but also with the problem of meaning. Rossi envisioned typology as standard elements that were scale-less and only meaningful when understood in a particular context.

This idea of typology raised the issue of rep-etition, suggesting that the city is given form by a repetition of certain archetypal elements or urban artefacts. The issue of repetition was also important in minimalist sculpture as a critique of narrative—the repeated series lacks beginning, middle, and end—and as a critique of origin, as the individual or starting unit is subsumed by other identical units. The repetition of an urban arte-fact destabilizes the relationship between these elements and their perceived aesthetic and func-tional value as cultural icons. Rossi uses iconic forms but strips them of their iconicity through

ings such as the Gallaratese housing project and subsequently in the Modena cemetery.

Rossi’s drawings are also a locus for his critique of contextualism. His drawings, for example, register both the dislocation of place through the repetition of typological elements, and the dissolution of scale through the intro-duction of domestic objects into the urban envi-ronment. In these drawings there are recurring formal themes: types based on Platonic forms are scaleless, placed in different contexts, and thus estranged from any classical concept of a part-to-whole unity; types drawn from domestic envi-ronments are envisaged at architectural scales;

these objects of domestic use, in their fi gured condition, capture Rossi’s questioning of scale related to typology. Rossi’s urban artefacts could exist at any scale, in an interior as well as in a cityscape, as is suggested in the drawing called Domestic Architecture. While the drawing seems to present a table top with a cup, goblet and cof-feepot in the center, all of which are household items, when the top is removed from the pot, the domestic object becomes an architectural form that reappears as Rossi’s Teatro del Mondo, his fl oating theater for the 1980 Venice Biennale. His play with scale allows the table, along with the fork and the spoon, to disappear into the city:

the table top becomes the ground and the cof-feepot becomes a building. Other elements, such

of typical elements. Gallaratese’s heavy pilotis return in a number of drawings, and when juxta-posed with the coffeepot, the mortar-and-pestle-like elements enter Rossi’s vocabulary as a means of describing an estrangement through scale.

Rossi’s drawings also combine aspects of the Modena project into new relationships with the city: Modena’s conical shrine resembles an indus-trial tower, and occupies the same landscape as an archetypal Tower of Babel. In Rossi’s painting of the courtyard of Fagnano, Modena’s square cru-ciform window forms the backdrop for an arcade reminiscent of the Gallaratese housing block.

Other drawings equate the punched-out square windows of Modena’s cubic ossuary to those of a house. It is when these elements are taken out of a real or built context that they become both analogic and textual, in that they do not conform to a single idea nor to any manifestation of reality. There is a play between the real and the abstract, between the scale of objects, and between the familiarity of objects which breaks down conventions that are attached to meaning, abstraction, form, and scale.

Drawings, for Rossi, are not intended as artwork, nor are they examples of metaphysical or surreal content like De Chirico’s urban landscapes. While the deep shadows, black windows, and white sur-faces of structures within Rossi’s drawings have De Chirico-esque characteristics, Rossi’s draw-ings are analogic as well as textual; they are a

cri-tique of architecture that cannot be made in the medium of architecture itself.

The Cemetery of San Cataldo project focuses the energy of Rossi’s drawings and the ideas in The Architecture of the City to render the cemetery as another type of city. In the draw-ings that Rossi submitted for his competition entry, the conception of the cemetery as a series of parts becomes clear: rows of columbaria and objectlike ossuaries are the locus for the sym-bolic burning of the bodies. The “town square”

occupying the center of the cemetery houses the artefacts culled from the interchangeably urban and domestic realms: the conical shrine recalls the coffeepot as well as the industrial tower, and the columbaria and ossuaries blend the typolo-gies of house and memorial. Rossi’s cemetery also draws on Enlightenment models such as Fischer von Erlach’s cemetery and Boullée’s

funerary monuments, yet transposes the themes of life and death through the symbol of the house.

In the project’s columbaria blocks, Rossi main-tains the formal condition of the house through the use of a pitched roof and windows, yet strips the windows of the elements—the frames, mul-lions, and glass—which signify occupation. As an emptied opening, the windows of the columbaria instead register absence.

Rossi’s project for the Cemetery of San Cataldo engages aspects of its context without resorting to a contextualist strategy, yet plays off of its position as an addition to a cemetery com-plex comprising a small Jewish cemetery and the existing Costa cemetery. The existing cemeter-ies—the campo santo (holy ground)—are tra-ditionally enclosed by an external wall. One of Rossi’s decisions involved using a wall to join the cemeteries, which sets into play the vertical and 9. Composition with plans, elevations, and sections, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, 1971.

horizontal axes of the traditional Roman town, which grids the cemetery complex. The plan of Rossi’s cemetery project can be read as a diptych with the existing Costa cemetery, and bears both symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships to this context, aligning and slipping out of alignment with different portions of the plan. While Rossi’s plan also responds in its geometric order to the Jewish cemetery, its multiple misalignments fur-ther disrupt the classic idea of a part-to-whole relationship. Alternatively, the cemetery project can be seen to take the theme of the enclosure of fi gured objects from Le Corbusier’s Mundaneum project. Yet Rossi’s plan rethinks Le Corbusier’s utopian gesture within the context of a more prob-lematic relationship of drawing to building.

The competition drawings of the Modena cemetery depict the symmetrical axis with an entrance arcade leading to the cubic ossuary, the U-shaped columbaria leading down a central axis to the conical shrine, and the enclosing structures with pitched roofs—many of which can be consid-ered traditional Rossian elements. These reap-pear within the context of the cemetery project, but have nothing to do with religious

symbol-ism, and instead become urban secular symbols brought into a sacred burial ground. The confu-sion of symbols between the sacred and profane is part of the textual nature of the project. The con-text of the idea of Le Corbusier’s plan as genera-tor is called into question as Rossi puts both sec-tional and perspectival elevations into the plan;

these, too, become typological elements deployed without scale and without the context of a single place or time.

Another relationship presented at Rossi’s Cemetery of San Cataldo relates to scale, both of the city and of the individual building. This critique is proposed through a single element:

the window. Le Corbusier suggested that when a window is too large or too small for a room—

that is, when it is not the right size—then one is in the presence of architecture. Therefore an excess in the relationship signifi es architecture as an excess in relationship to the functionality of the object. Rossi’s strategy differs slightly from Le Corbusier’s and is more akin to that in Adolf Loos’s house projects, in which the exterior of the house was conceived as different and sepa-rate from the interior. The facade in Loos’s case 10. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbarium exterior. 11. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbarium interior.

12. Cemetery of San Cataldo, niches, ossuary.

was a double-sided membrane that articulated the urban scale of the city on one side and the domestic scale of the house on the other. Rossi also developed a similar strategy at Gallaratese, where the standard square window is sized in relationship to the scale of the square outside rather than for the room within, for which it is too large. This distortion of scale indicates that the room can be read as having been tacked onto the facade of the square. Thus the actual facade plane of the building is not to be read as the exterior of a building, but rather as the exterior facade enclosure of the public space. This play of scale articulates an idea about a disjunction in the rela-tionship between facade-part and public space-whole in terms of the city.

The punched square window openings that reappear in the Modena cemetery similarly question the relationship of part-to-whole. The window functions as both the outside and inside of urban scale: the exterior scale of the window differs from that of its interior, from which one can read the slightly smaller frame of the exte-rior window. The legible change in dimension between inner and outer windows is poignant, in

that the wall thickness houses the square slots for urns. Moreover, the dimension of these square spaces is related to that of the window, a relation-ship reiterated by windows with a cruciform sub-division. The multiple scales at which the square operates are legible as a honeycombed effect, with the square window as an insert, reproducing the windows at many different scales. The window becomes the register of several repetitions: that of the square form, and that of the cruciform sub-division. Rossi also introduces an uncanny effect produced by other typologies—for example, that of the Tuscan farmhouse, with stucco surfaces, columns, and pitched roof. The square open-ing punched into the wall is a traditional type of window, yet in this context the window becomes a register of a space of absence and emptiness.

Modena is important as much for its draw-ings as it is for the building, even though it was never built or completed as drawn. Many of the drawings are partial plan views rendered as fl at-tened, one-point perspective views, similar to a cubist still life. Only the heavy outline of Rossi’s drawings attest to another sensibility. The draw-ings are diagrams and the builddraw-ings, in many 13. Cemetery of San Cataldo, columbarium.

that the portion of the Cemetery of San Cataldo that was built is not as deeply evocative of the ideas that exist in the drawings of the cemetery.

Certain of Rossi’s drawings for the cemetery depict the ground plane becoming a skylight, as if describing an interchangeability of ground and sky, of plan and window. In this sense, Rossi’s title “The Blue of the Sky” speaks of a condition in which the sacredness of the ground has disap-peared—dissolved, in some sense—into the vast emptiness of the sky.

Modena’s physical buildings are power-ful in their austerity and reticence; their

Modena’s physical buildings are power-ful in their austerity and reticence; their