Aldo Rossi (1931 - 1997)

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.

King's College London

Shown below is of my design proposal for King's College. In recent years the College has bought and refurbished the East Wing of Somerset House. The intention of my thesis project is to stitch the various parts of the College together and provide a culturally relevant spatial and functional strategy for the future. At the heart of this is the revitalisation of the Quad which is currently neglected as a service yard for the University. Propositionally I  am removing the oversized zeilenbau block which faces on the Strand and replacing it with two lower buildings which provided a gateway to the Strand/Quad and frame the church of Mary-le-Strand. One of these buildings connects into Somerset House via a loggia. Somerset House's ground floor is 600mm higher than the level of the Quad. The loggia provides a programatic function as well as being a place for human gathering and activity. Visually the loggia accentuates the horizontal plane in order to create visual continuity between spaces: from Strand to Quad and onto the river (nature). A room at the top of the New Strand Building includes a terrace space for external meetings and a view point to watch the Duel Day festivities: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/iss/archives/wellington/duel08.htm

Next semester is to develop this in more detail.

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1. Sketch of King's

2. Sketch of Uffizi, Florence

3. Propositional Collage 1

4. Propositional Collage 2

5. 1:50 Model of Loggia

6. Sketch of Inigo Jones's Triumphant Route from Whitehall Palace to Old St Paul's

7. Existing Site Plan

8. Existing Site Section

9. Proposed Site Plan

10. Proposed Site Section

11. Proposed Elevation

12. Room Study

13. Room Study

Royal Courts of Justice - portfolio work

Updated Royal Courts of Justice work.
-Photograph of cast of stairs at the rear of site
-Courtroom 11 in action
-Internal elevation of Courtroom 11

Roman Bath - Strand Lane

Following on from the statement below I have begun to look at King's College and the surrounding area. On College land, within the parish of St Clement Danes sits a Roman Bath. Neglected, it is more likely Tudor but is classed as Roman in Dickens' David Copperfield. Of interest to me was the location of the baths within King's, how the College has evolved and expanded, the excessive civic pride of Reverend William Pennington-Bickford, and the future of the parish. I have drawn the bath and made a model of explore the phenomenological aspects of the space. 


The year's research so far is building to a project within King's Quadrangle as a means to reassert a public space, give the University a civic role, design a new School of Law, avoid the typological destruction of Somerset House's Eastern Wing, and provide a more coherent link from church to Quadrangle to the Thames. All of this has the intention of making the good quality spaces that people want to inhabit. 


See: http://www.strandlines.net/story/romans-bathing-strand-lane-bath
For more information on the Bath. I feel no need to reproduce the excellent research that Michael Trapp has done on the subject.

From top to bottom: Plan, model photograph, Section, and another model photograph

Project Blurb

‘It is not always easy, but it is always revealing to discover that behind the directly visible order of the city and its conventional representations (morphology, typology, figure-ground plans, etc), there is not a chaos but an order of a different kind, more profound and more permanent than the visible order itself.’

Dalibor Vesely

If a city enshrines the dreams and fears of its’ citizens, then what does London say about us? That it was two cities and numerous villages and towns, drawn together by trade, religion, and changes in taste during the 17^th century, bombed then ruined by road engineering? One thing is clear, that London is full of public buildings but lacking in communicative space. There are no grand squares or piazzas; instead marooned buildings stand trapped on traffic islands.

             The area to the east of Waterloo Bridge, west of Middle and Inner Temple, south of Lincolns Inn Fields is rich in civic institutions and public buildings. Deprived of their relationship to the Thames and strangled by road engineering, these isolated fragments fail to fulfil any sort of civic purpose or cultural meaning.

         The task at hand is to renew these existing fragments by tying them into a coherent hierarchical spatial sequence connected by public spaces. Other programs, when relevant and appropriate, will be incorporated as a part of the strategy. The proposal will allow for a return the forgotten and latent meanings of human situations such as death, birth, friendship, and public encounters. The likelihood is that the forum or agora or several similar spaces, return as the centre of civic life. Traditionally these spaces and their buildings have given meaning to the personal, social, political, commercial, and cultural life of the city. At the heart of the strategy is the desire to establish a dialogue between the present form of culture and those possibilities forgotten or dormant in the depths of tradition, alive in memories and residual beyond the fragments that exist. In order to avoid the meaninglessness of the modern city, it is not necessary to search for some ideal order of the past and paste this into the present. Instead we can start with the given reality of the existing city and unearth a residuum of tradition and myth sufficient to support a reinterpretation of the status quo. 

St Peter's Church. Klippan

Two trains, one ferry and thirty minutes sleep: the pilgrimage to Klippan. I've some words on the building too but thats for in a few days time. Not a review of any kind but just a glimpse into the experience. Only a couple of photographs: bad camera, and no tripod. I recommend Sandy Wilson on the building though:

Aristotle in The Poetics, assigns unique significance to the ability to invent metaphor: 'The greatest thing by far is to be master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others and it is also a sign of genius since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilar.' Lewerentz possessed this unteachable gift to a marked degree. We will see, for instance, how, in St Peter's, a painfully evolved solution to the need for central support- a 'technical' assembly of raw steel sections into a column and crossbeam, which thrusts into the centre of the Church- irresistibly recalls the central symbols of both the New and Old Testaments: the tree of knowledge and the cross of redemption.


Architectural Reflections

Top image from: http://arch.et.bme.hu/kep/Image744.jpg
Others are my own

Malmö Eastern Cemetery

Sigurd Lewerentz worked on the Malmo Eastern Cemetery from 1916 until 1969. The site shows the development of his architectural thought and the presence of something beyond style. TS Eliot might refer to it as tradition.


The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to the work to be done. And he is not likely to know what is to be done unless he lives in what is not merely the present, but the present moment of the past, unless he is conscious, not of what is dead , but what is already living. 

The 1969 Flower shop. His final building. Tough stuff. 

 

The Belvedere which deals with the topography of the entrance coming up, rooting itself in the earth and then resulting in the ridge which runs across the site.

Various details that interested me from the chapels of St Knut and St Gertrude, 1943.