Aldo Rossi: The White Walls of the City

Abstract

For Aldo Rossi, every architectural project is ‘an unfinished love affair: it is most beautiful before it ends’.¹ In architecture, as in love, it is when happiness reaches its height that we would like to withdraw, regain our freedom, since ‘every moment that we become aware of things is coloured by the longing to be able to give them up’. Forgetting Architecture is the title that Aldo Rossi would have liked to give to his Scientific Autobiography (1981), a work published in English, in the United States, as if it were necessary to get away from Italy in order to be an Italian architect. The forgetting of architecture could be taken literally: Aldo Rossi does not just build but, to an ever greater extent, he draws, as is shown by Il libro azzurro, an exquisite sketch-book comprising a set of 48 drawings accompanied by notes, which encompass the habitual forms of his architecture: lighthouses (how can one help being reminded of those by Giorgio de Chirico?), cabins and the primary elements of architecture such as cylinders, columns, pillars, walls. But forgetting architecture also means breaking up its outlines, integrating architecture into a broader comprehension of the discipline, where the written page, the sketch, the plan and the construction are not too different from each other, since each repeats the same idea by different means.