Aldo Rossi Overview

Aldo Rossi fought against the Modernist quest for urban renewal, which he felt produced architecture that tended to devalue the needs of people, to appear at odds with its surroundings, to lack identity, and unintentionally to serve as a tool of... [more]

Aldo Rossi fought against the Modernist quest for urban renewal, which he felt produced architecture that tended to devalue the needs of people, to appear at odds with its surroundings, to lack identity, and unintentionally to serve as a tool of class or economic oppression. Rossi brought classical, established building forms back into the Modernist vocabulary, distilling these "memory" forms into pure architectural order. He, along with other members of the Tendenza movement in Italian architecture, felt that a transcendental meaning accompanied Classicism and he strove to preserve this in his work. Rossi's theories are presented in his influential book, "L'architettura della Citta" (1966), in which he defines the role of traditional building types in the development of the urban environment. Obsession with Michel Foucault's theories and Jeremy Bentham's concept of the panopticon -- a central well to be used in prisons that could allow guards to see everywhere at once -- caused Rossi to focus his attention on institutions such as schools, prisons, and hospitals. His famous apartment block for the Gallatarese district of Milan, which evokes the architecture of the traditional Milanese tenement, is stripped down to basic geometric forms such as cubes and cylinders. Rossi said of the block, "the corridors signify a lifestyle bathed in everyday occurrences, domestic intimacy, and varied personal relationships." Architecture for Rossi, though not explicitly designed with functionalism in mind, was still intended for an entirely human reality -- as opposed to the post-humanist work of some mainstream Modernists who created more alienating architecture. [show less]