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My first encounter with Aldo Rossi may have been related to my longtime admiration for Giorgio De Chirico. Why did Rossi incorporate De Chirico’s metaphysical style into his drawings and architectural designs? What caused Rossi to create the Monument for the Partisans, supported by a thick column topped with a triangular block resembling wooden toys or LEGO bricks?
 
This publication is a monograph on the architect and architectural theorist Aldo Rossi (1931–1997), who was alive primarily in Italy in the latter half of the 20th century. The aim of this book is to distinguish Rossi from the categories of “forgotten” or “postmodern” architects to which he has been delegated in current Japanese architectural education, and spotlight him within contemporary actuality. Thus, I have purposely developed a new architectural theory at a time when not only architects, but also artists and humanistic academicians, are in crisis.
 
While he had a strong Catholic upbringing and education, Rossi decided to join the Italian Communist Party in his youth and struggled to find a position between the two conflicting ideologies. In the midst of the struggle, Rossi spearheaded La Tendenza, an architectural movement of experimentation with architectural forms that arose against the postwar Italian cultural background.
 
This movement revived as urban memories the architectural forms of the past that had been treated as mere hollow bones. When we employ this idea as an architectural design, memories can be translated into a meaningless architectural language with primitive geometry, such as “circle, triangle, and square,” which explains why Rossi was strongly attracted to Zen drawing. Geometry itself has no particular significance in design yet suggests diverse contexts. Aiming for architectural design for everyone, Rossi articulated these geometrical things that appear to be dead but finally regain life.
 
Covering the whole of Rossi’s life, this book offers the vicarious experience of themes of “memory” and “geometry” in which manufactures are reconstructed as images in the mind. It looks back to the past, revisiting Rossi’s articles, papers, and diaries (I Quaderni azzurri, The Blue Notebooks) and exploring his architecture through photographs, illustrations, drawings, and actual measurements to bring the reader closer to Rossi’s design process.
 
In addition, as a chronological narrative, the book explores how the young Rossi established his position through his interactions with the star architects of his generation. This was done by tracing the theoretical underpinnings of the La Tendenza movement through his relationships with the likes of Manfredo Tafuri, who became a theoretical ally; Carlo Aymonino, who hired Rossi as an assistant when he taught at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia in Venice; Giorgio Grassi, who worked as an assistant of Rossi at Politechnico di Milano, where he deepened his understanding of forms; and Gianugo Polesello, one of Rossi’s most important collaborators at Studio di Architettura (SDA) in the early 1960s. Also included is an interview with Toyota Horiguchi of SDA Tokyo, who was Rossi’s first collaborator in Japan from the late 1980s to the 1990s, jointly designing a dozen architectural works.
 
Overall, my approach to the “memory of geometry” that initially triggered my study of Rossi the architect is to stimulate the artist’s tendenza and analogies through primitive geometry across various images. While adhering to the rules of architectural history, I reintroduce transgressive references to still lives from the past.
 
I seek a free relationship between still lives as they might have been. I seek and portray still lives. I capture the signs of still lives without names to revive the memories of the images created by the deceased Rossi, the sketch artist. Through these attempts, I believe that the geometry of memory can be shared in the act of “fictionalizing the quotidian suspending of the meaning.”
 

(Written by: KATAGIRI Yuji / November 27, 2024)