Architect: Aldo Rossi

Tree Speech

Tree Speech

– Sylvia Lavin

The following text is the fourth of a series of four essays on trees in architectural drawings by Sylvia Lavin. The essays were first published in Log 49 (Summer 2020). Drawing Matter would like to thank the author and the journal’s editors for allowing us reproduce the essays on www.drawingmatter.org.… Read More

Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)

Gallaratese & Fagnano Olona (1976)

– Aldo Rossi

Two fragments of texts paired with two fragments of process. Writing in the May 1976 issue of Architecture + Urbanism, Rossi reflects on two projects: the Gallaratese Housing Complex, Milan and the Fagnano Olona in the Lombardy region. In both of the drawings placed alongside the architect’ s writing, the forms… Read More

Aldo & Adolf

Aldo & Adolf

– Aldo Rossi

And architecture itself? Architecture is still the central theme of Loos’s thought, and among his essays is a piece on the competition sponsored by the Chicago Tribune, a piece, which, like the one on the Michaelerhaus and ‘Ornament and Crime,’ is essential to the understanding of the meaning of architecture. This… Read More

The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s

The Office Copier and Baptism by Colour: Working for Rossi in the 1990s

– Maurizio Diton

Aldo made this drawing when the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht was already realised. I would say that it is typical for the kind of drawing he would make when he was bored, done with the first pencil and sheet of paper to hand. It is a drawing that already evokes… Read More

Alternative Histories: 2A+P/A on Aldo Rossi

Alternative Histories: 2A+P/A on Aldo Rossi

Starting from the analysis of a drawing by Rossi, made for the competition project on the student house in Trieste in 1974 – with the curious title “La vita Calda (The warm life)” – we begun to investigate a series of recurring elements in Rossi’s architecture, especially in his first… Read More

Aldo Rossi Cabina Construction

Aldo Rossi Cabina Construction

– Tom Graham

The blue and pink cabin suffers from a few structural/constructional inadequacies. The first of these to be noticed is the door which binds within in its ‘frame’ (there is no frame as such; the short strap hinges simply hang off the boarding). The vertical boards which make the door have… Read More

Without Irony 3

Without Irony 3

– Niall Hobhouse

Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi

– Jesse Reiser

In the spring of 1979 John Hejduk invited Aldo Rossi to teach at Cooper Union. I’m not certain when he met Rossi, but Rossi was crucial, I would say, to John’s last major shift in his work. He saw something in Rossi’s analogical project that would allow him to transition… Read More

Notes on the 2016 Summer School

Notes on the 2016 Summer School

– Helen Mallinson

Found in translation At first it seemed hugely unfair to invite an audience of some thirty adept critics to review a week’s drawing work by eight students, the more so in the dauntingly Olympian cultural setting of Hauser & Wirth. The review was held in Smiljan Radic’s 2014 Serpentine Pavilion,… Read More

Future Scenarios, Part II

Future Scenarios, Part II

– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

FRAGMENTS: THE BUILDING SITE AND THE RUIN Louis-Jean Desprez turns to another legendary city of the ancient world — Alexander’s capital in Egypt — to advocate in a dream view of Alexandria in construction what great ambitions might be aroused in the new king of Sweden, after his predecessor, who… Read More

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978

– Markus Lähteenmäki, Manuel Montenegro and Nicholas Olsberg

This Was Tomorrow: Reinventing Architecture 1953–1978 is an exhibition about architectural imagination and the power, processes and poetics of creation and invention. It presents a series of twelve episodes – beginning in the 1950s – that look at the ferment of new ideas as architects began to reconceive space in response… Read More

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

Aldo Rossi: Architecture and the City (1982)

– Peter Eisenman

The architectural drawing, formerly thought of exclusively as a form of representation, now becomes the locus of another reality. It is not only the site of illusion, as it has been traditionally, but also a real place of the suspended time of both life and death. Its reality is neither… Read More

History & Origins

History & Origins

– Aldo Rossi

And these old drawings […] now have their own history, an almost enforced form of composition. And yet I wonder at the fact that they are the origin or germ of these new architectural works, which others could regard as more professional. In actual fact, invention and imagination have deeper… Read More

Simplification

Simplification

– Niall Hobhouse and Nicholas Olsberg

The first of these short excursions into work on paper looked at how drawings were used to place built forms in their settings. Grounded in traditions of illustration, they were spacious, suggestive and pictorial. Architects draw to many purposes. In Part II, on Simplification, we turn from the arts of… Read More