The Golden rule in any art is: keep in there punching. For the public is not so much endlessly gullible as endlessly hopeful: after twenty years, after forty years even, it still half expects your next book or film or play to reproduce that first fine careless rapture, however clearly you have demonstrated that whatever talent you once possessed has long since degenerated into repetition, platitude or frivolity.
Philip Larkin; Jazz Writing: Essays and Reviews 1940 – 1984
Let us suppose that Aldo Rossi had passed away in 1982. What would we have made of his legacy now? He wrote two brilliant books: The Architecture of the City, 1966, and Scientific Autobiography, 1981. The later was a memoir of the artistic influences on his work. The former was an analysis of the failings of functionalism and a potential cure. Rossi proposed the European city might recuperate itself through a reading and use of typology. Through his interpretation of anthropologists and philosophers he was lead to develop a theory of urban form and change dependent upon the idea of type.
According to Quatremere de Quincy, a type is a built form that recurs over time and has no specific function attached to it. The arcade is one particular urban form. Another is the cross-mullioned window. A further example is the gallery. In none of these cases does the function with which the types are used- shopping, housing, commerce - effect the perseverance of the type over time. However, this is not to be confused with a purely formalist definition. Instead Rossi understood the city as a representation of the human condition. Hence these forms have become pathological archetypes. They are embedded into the collective memory of the city and its citizens.
Rossi’s intention was to shield the city from empty architectural imagery. He proposed a simplified architecture that would act as a background for human situations rather than a representation of it. It is at the San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, 1980, that Rossi gives the most concrete description of his urban theory. Here the cemetery is interpreted as the city of the dead. A long, empty arcade separates the existing cemetery from the extension. Next to this extended gateway is a city wall, within which are a three floors of vaults. At the centre of the extension is a red cube, punched open with windows. It is open to the sky and beside it will rise a chimney. These are the monuments of the city. Between city wall and monument are the streets, lined on both sides with single-storey buildings. These will contain more tombs. Typical parts of the city are repeated. Importance is given to the unfinished as the dead do not need protection from the cold. Occasionally it is occupied by the living when they visit a tomb. The windows for instance are the same as in the houses for the living. The form is similar but without those parts which would make them useful. The entire project reinforces this idea of emptiness, beginning with the empty arcade: it is an arrival to nothing that gives meaning to the approach.
Following the English translations of his books in the 1980’s Rossi’s fame grew. With this came professorships in America. A dilution of his architecture was caused through working outside of the European cities he knew best. As the plaudits and clients lined up, the work lost sight of the role of collective memory to the city. Rossi began to design buildings where the type was reduced to image. The type-image dealt only with visual recognition. It seems that Rossi was prepared to sacrifice anything deeper so long as communication of a building’s separate elements was achieved.
San Cataldo is a monument to Neo-Rational principles, though it suggests little towards an urban recuperation. Instead we are left with a beautiful but dumb architecture. When Rossi was good, he was brilliant. One only has to consider the Gallaterese Housing Block in Milan (1970) or the floating Teatro del Mondo in Venice (1979). But when he was bad, he was dreadful. His later work in particular. For instance the bright green Quartier Schützenstrasse in Berlin (1994). Here type and form are summarized to a cartoon. It is of no surprise that he has fallen out of fashion and thought.
