Eisenman on Rossi

– Peter Eisenman

Rossi’s analogous drawings, like his analogous writings, deal primarily with time. Unlike the analogous writings, however, the drawings represent the suspension of two times: one processual—where the drawn object is something moving toward but not yet arrived at its built representation; and the other atmospheric—where drawn shadows indicate the stopping of the clock, are a frozen and constant reminder of this new equation of life and death. No longer in the analogous drawing is time represented by a precisely measured aspect of light, the length of a shadow or the aging of a thing. Rather, time is expressed as an infinite past which takes things back to the timelessness of childhood, of illusions, of fragments of possessions and autobiographical images of the author’s own alienated childhood—of which history’s narrative can no longer give an effective account. Yet for Rossi, this personal aspect of architecture is unsentimentalised. In his personal vision of time, the same dialectic applies as in the city: history provides the material for biography but memory provides material for autobiography; as in the city, memory begins when history ends. It encompasses both future time and past time: a project that has to be done and one that is already completed. The images of ruin activate this unconscious memory, linking the discarded and the fragmentary with new beginnings. Here again, the apparently coherent orderliness of logic is biographical, but fragments are autobiographical. Abandonment and death—the attributes of the skeleton—are through this dialectic now seen as parts of a process of transformation; death is a new beginning associated with some unknown hope. 

This text was first published in ‘The House of Memory: The Texts of Analogy’ (1982). Aldo Rossi’s painting Scena Per il Teatrino from the Drawing Matter Collection is currently exhibited in Soane and Modernism: Make it New at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

The choice of the text followed an energetic discussion, and a search to find a few paragraphs—amongst the huge corpus of writing by Rossi, and by others—that succinctly describe his drawings and paintings of the city.

Peter Eisenman is an internationally recognised architect and educator.