Aldo Rossi at Drawing Matter
– Editors and Nicholas Olsberg
Aldo Rossi started as a painter, working in the tradition and model of Mario Sironi, whose metaphysical landscapes echo throughout his later work. Although his architectural career commenced with writing, editing and teaching, drawing—especially drawing with colour—remained the principal means to explore and communicate his ideas, and to evoke the emotional resonance of his built works. One day every week was dedicated to imaginative drawing, regardless of his other commitments. Working and specification drawings were largely assigned to associated practices, so that the studio remained an atelier practice in which Rossi’s fascination with drawing could be sustained. As a result, his work fitted very readily into the new gallery and museum world of the 1970s and 80s, entering collections across Europe and North America.
The principal archive of the office—with well over two thousand project drawings and models— is at the CCA which received the material from the Rossi estate in 2001. However, substantial collections were gathered throughout Rossi’s lifetime by many other repositories too, most notably the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, with extraordinary holdings for the earlier work from the period between 1969–78. The Getty Research Institute acquired the principal corpus of libri azzuri—the written and drawn journals that constitute the bones of Rossi’s ‘scientific autobiography’, and Centre Pompidou has a significant group of later drawings, starting in 1973. In recent years the substantial, albeit somewhat scattered, remains from branches of the estate and the gallery market have continued to enter collections, including those of the Italian state. A comprehensive collection of printed multiples and other graphic works is at the Museum Bonnefanten, and there are small but important incidental groups at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Tchoban Foundation in Berlin.
The selection gathered by Drawing Matter covers the entire scope of Rossi’s architectural work from 1969 to 1995, and illustrates the varied methods, media and techniques he employed. This selection provides a window into the central ideas of Rossi, as expressed in drawing.
On Aldo Rossi and his approach to drawing, read here 30 texts, published on Drawing Matter since 2011.
to view the complete drawing matter collections of Aldo rossi, click here.
collected works, 1969–95
museum, santo stefano, 1969
Two sheets of conceptual studies for a proposed museum from an early sketchbook with an explanatory note. It was developed as a pair of rising, graduated sequences of rooms flanking a porticoed corridor which ends in a tapered, conical, or ziggurat tower on a circular base. The studies explore formal characteristics, which were then beginning to appear in the designs for his first important built project in the Gallaratese district of Milan. These forms became the essential elements of the two major built works that followed: the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena and the school at Fagnano Olona, and took a central place in his imaginative constructions of the theatre of the city late in the 70s, before reemerging in elegiac form in the Museum Bonnefanten in Maastricht (1990–95).
San Cataldo Cemetery, Modena, 1972 (1979)
A revisited version, painted in vivid colours directly from the tube by his intern Jesse Reiser, of the iconic summary presentation of the San Cataldo scheme in which systematised silhouette perspectives and simplified plans of the entire proposed scheme and its elements—some never completed—are rendered as a montage. Several original versions in softer tones appear in other collections, notably in the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, which holds the primary corpus for the project. The framed original can be seen in Luigi Ghirri’s photographs (1988) of Rossi’s studio in the via Maddalena.
La calda vita, turin, 1975
A colour perspective of an unbuilt student housing scheme, in which Rossi recalls the Trieste writer Gambini’s coming-of-age novel ‘La Calda Vita’. An essential inquiry project, it is exhaustively documented in a collection of drawings held at CCA.
Primary School, Fagnano Olona, 1975
A composite of sketches of plan and perspective on a single sheet presenting the entire, highly influential, scheme.
Student housing, chieti, 1976
A formal, coloured montage on a single sheet of 8 measured drawings sheets for the student residence scheme, drawing heavily on a simplified vernacular.
administrative and cultural centre, Florence, 1977–78
A large coloured and annotated collage on a photocopy base of a proposed new town in the western district of Florence, which acts as a key to the extensive archive of the project at CCA.
URBAN SCENES: URBAN FRAGMENT, 1977; GEOMETRICA DELLA MEMORIA, 1978; SCENA PER IL TEATRINO, 1978; MAN IN THE WINDOW #3, 1979
The following examples at different scales and media are from Rossi’s imaginary ensembles of urban fragments. Many derive from his time in New York, some were developed as scenes for built works and others with gallery presentation in mind. They constitute a ‘geometry of common memory’ and a repertoire of simplified historical and vernacular forms on which he will continue to draw as international commissions for works in the real world increase.
Teatro del Mondo, 1980
A colour serigraph from 1980 of two paired elevations for Rossi’s floating theatre, which was designed to house ‘scenes’ of urban memory and invention. Launched in anticipation of the 1980 Biennale, it was laid first at anchor on two sites in Venice and then set briefly in motion through Venice, before sailing to Dubrovnik later in the year.
A colour print from 1981 in the form of a ‘still life’ assembling an imaginary collage of city towers, from the brick ziggurat to purist glass container, with two set-back towers adapting the form of Teatro del Mondo.
First Venice Architecture biennale, 1980
The central component of the Biennale—seen as a coming-of-age show for ideas of post-modernity and entitled ‘Presence of the Past’—was a gallery of works by many invited architects running as a streetscape through the Corderie at the Arsenale. Rossi was assigned the temporary portal and entrance, for which Drawing Matter has two large sheets of numerous and intensive-coloured studies, mostly in perspective. They are accompanied by a sheet of soft pencil studies for an unexecuted covered bridge in shed form.
Cabina, 1980–81
A measured colour working drawing for the painted wood cabin or armoire as exhibited at Protetch Gallery in 1980.
Palazzo dello Sport, milan, 1987–88
A large sheet of sketches in pencil developed over time to examine analogies between familiar elements of the urban landscape of Milan and Rossi’s emerging proposal for a new sports complex outside the city, including conceptual plans and a preliminary perspective.
Monumenti Milanesi, Studio per il Palazzo dello Sport, 1988. Pencil, pen and ink, crayon, and body colour on tracing, 410 × 780 mm. DMC 3609. © Eredi Aldo Rossi.
Museum Bonnefanten, Maastricht, 1990–95
A range of perspectives, measured drawings, conceptual montages, and study sketches for Museum Bonnefanten, finished in 1995. The project, which Rossi studied and developed exhaustively, has an elegiac quality as it conscientiously echoes and reassembles elements from his lifelong inventory of remembered urban forms.
Sections, Museum Bonnefanten, Maastricht, 1990. Colour print on Canson watercolour paper, 890 × 1110 mm. DMC 3016. © Eredi Aldo Rossi.
Palazzo dei Congressi, Milan, 1991
A large painted wood model produced for the second of two proposals for a convention centre in Milan. Drawing on some of the language of Gallaratese, it shows a stacked central core of urban memory dominated by a cylinder and cone, with the site is bordered on three sides by a double-height columnar gallery. Though the scheme was not realised, the project weaves many of Rossi’s ideas into a collage that stands, like the Museum Bonnefanten, as something of a testament to the memory forms long dancing in his head. The Rossi archive at CCA has three additional models and a series of over six hundred drawings of this scheme.
Offices for EuroDisney, Orlando, Florida, 1991
Landsberger allee, Berlin, 1992
An elevation for Landsberger Allee near the Berlin Wall, completed in 1997, in which Rossi incorporated elements of the Palazzo Farnese, and revived the idea of highly coloured surfaces.
Darsena, Venice, 1992
Colour chart, 1992
Schützenstraße, Berlin, 1994
Four works enunciating the scheme for this urban streetscape collage orchestrated on a concrete framework—partly built but never completed as planned. A richly annotated colour photocopy sheet identifies the different proposed components and their sources in two sketch elevations; another presents a more articulated rendering of the possible facades; and two black and white prints present the final, simplified proposed elevations.
