Architect: Aldo Rossi

Protected: Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longure Duree

Protected: Aldo Rossi: ‘Shards’ and Smooth Surfaces for an Architecture of Longure Duree

Beatrice Lampariello

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection

Aldo Rossi: Transforming Artefacts into Objects of Affection

Marianna Charitonidou

Michael Sorkin, in Drawings for Sale, draws a distinction between two levels of the impact of architectural drawings on their spectator: ‘the drawing as artefact and the drawing as the representation of certain ideas about some architecture’. Sorkin argues that the power of the impact of a drawing on its spectator… Read More

Protected: Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Protected: Drawing Programme: A Drawing Matter Workshop

Niall Hobhouse, Manuel Montenegro and Amy Teh

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.

Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto

Aldo Rossi: Dieses Ist Lange Her/ora Questo e Perduto

Jaime Tillería Durango

Looking at This was a long time ago/now this is lost, as well as other drawings in Rossi’s unofficial collection of l’architettura assassinata, brings to mind the image of a feast. The scenes are funereal indeed, but they hold a festive aura, as if a celebration had just taken place… Read More

The Evolving Role of Drawing

The Evolving Role of Drawing

Nicholas Olsberg

This text was first published in The Architectural Review in 2013. Carlo Scarpa, in a famously infamous gesture, opened all his courses in design at the University of Venice by demonstrating the art of sharpening a pencil. That was the precise point, he claimed, from which all architecture proceeds. And… Read More

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, Student Housing, Chieti

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

The 1976 competition for student housing was part of a development scheme for the recently founded D’Annunzio University, a joint initiative by the neighbouring provinces of Chieti and Pescara in the Abruzzo region of southern Italy. The town of Chieti is located 200km northeast of Rome, on the ancient main… Read More

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

The Urban Fact: Aldo Rossi, The School, Fagnano Olona

Kersten Geers, Stefano Graziani and Jelena Pancevac

This is part one of two excerpts chosen from The Urban Fact: A Reference Book on Aldo Rossi. The second text, on Aldo Rossi’s Student Housing in Chieti, completed in 1976, will be available soon. Please see the end of the page for more information on this publication. The Olona… Read More

Drawing Powers 3: the drawing in the object

Drawing Powers 3: the drawing in the object

Fernando Poeiras

This text is the third in a series of five in which Fernando Poeiras (ESAD.CR/LIDA), explores the different powers of drawing within architectural design projects. Each text is illustrated with examples from the Drawing Matter Collection. Find the introduction to the series here. It was the drawing that led me to architecture,… Read More

Letter to the Editors: What I see in drawings today…

Letter to the Editors: What I see in drawings today…

Andrea Leonardi

All the discussions, observations or decisions, concerning any of the projects of Aldo Rossi, by clients, city mayors, commissions or whoever had to approve or express a comment, were always made over his first sketch. There you had everything, the building – or whatever was the project for – was… Read More

This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 1989

This Blue Love: Aldo Rossi in Samos in late Summer 1989

Vincenzo Moschetti

In his voyage to Samos in the Summer of 1989 Aldo Rossi gathered a collection of fragments in accordance with a Palladian education. The image repeats itself, following what Johns had written in 1984: ‘I like to repeat an image in another medium to observe the play between the two:… Read More

Ritual and Repitition at San Cataldo Cemetery

Ritual and Repitition at San Cataldo Cemetery

Marwa El Mubark

In an AA article from 1995, Adam Caruso wrote that ‘buildings are about many things. Their design develops out of a set of complex and changing circumstances and, once built, the ‘meaning’ of a good building can shift and remain relevant as its social and physical situation changes.’ The same… Read More

Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing

Aldo Rossi: Divination of a Drawing

Chloe Spiby Loh

‘With the instinct of a water-diviner, he begins to search, and that which is inside… begins to simmer to the surface.’ – Giorgio De Chirico This is a short meditation on an enigmatic drawing by Aldo Rossi. The drawing is framed as a stacked layering of three architectural elements whose… Read More