The Analog City represents Aldo Rossi’s design theory. As a way to understand the concept of analog design in Rossi’s theory, this essay will explore his work on the Analog City and the concepts, references, and ideas that imply. As an analog project itself, this concept has been mentioned throughout his books, essays, and drawings, but it has been developed especially in his work on the Analog City but without a straight declaration of his theory behind it. By analyzing Rossi’s concepts of memory, catalogs, experiences, and fantasy we can re-create this irrational world that Rossi has transformed into reality in his Analog City. This essay will speculate on an analog design theory which will allow us to relate, understand, apply, reinterpret or reject its intentions 34 years after its conception.
The first step in this analysis is to understand the specific definition and relation between analog and logos that best match Rossi’s theory. Carl Jung defined and contrasted the critical and rational characteristics of Logos with the emotional, non-reason oriented of Eros. This could present the base of a dialectic between logos vs analogs, reason vs no-reason. Related with Rossi’s theory, he explored both: the reason and no-reason; the former related to sciences, history, and archeology and the later with the concepts of memory and fantasy, as a way to make unreal things real. For Rossi, his irrationality is based on memory which is the catalog of references, projects, things that he has seen and transferred through his experiences and observation, for being used as a superposition of memories in his internal catalog for design. As an example of this concept, Rossi states “In the Architecture of the City, I spoke of the cities of Andalusia; buildings like the Alhambra in Granada and the Mesquita in Cordoba were the paradigms of an architecture which is transformed over time, of an architecture acquainted with immense spaces and delicate solutions and constituting the city. I now realize that these impressions are reflected in my architecture. The analogical links, the associations between things and situations, became multiplied during my stay in Andalusia, so that images of the structure of the house of Seville began to emerge elsewhere, mixing autobiography and civic history”[1].
Rossi introduces the concept of time in his idea of the monument, by architecture that has overpasses the human existence and has lost its original meaning in its context, allowing new interpretations and uses. For that reason, he makes the analogy with the concept of skeletons, which are structures that we know nothing more than the final result. In this idea, Rossi uses the dialectic of history and typology, where history is analogous to the skeleton as a measure of time. On the other hand, the typology becomes the instrument of this time measurement. This skeleton serves to bring the past into the present, giving to the city a past that could be experienced. These elements are incorporated into the city not because of its original function, nor by their context, but just because of their form. This form could allow new and different function and relate to other skeletons forms in the city through time. In this case, Rossi’s Analog city disrupts the idea of time and place of the real city by creating a new city base on the dialectic of history and memories with no place and no time. “Where the skeleton was seen as the form and measure of specific times and places in the city, the analogous design process displaces the specifics of time and place in the city for another reality, a psychological one based on memory. While the skeleton, as a physical and analytical object embedded in a humanist and modernist context, represents verifiable data, archaeological artifact, memory and analogy bring the process of architecture into the realm of the psychological, transforming both subject and object. The analogous process, when applied to the actual geography of the city, therefore acts as a corrosive agent”[2].
The use of operations such as repetition, collage, displacement and distortion from one project to another can create a new project but at the same time with the memory of the old one. Rossi states “Throughout my life I have often been hospitalized for fractures and other injuries to my bones, and this has given me some sense and knowledge of the engineering of the body, which would otherwise have been inconceivable to me”[3]. Things that had been broken or have lost their meaning, Rossi used them to reassemble as an archeological and, at the same time, surgical operation. Again, we can see the dialectics of analog and logos that Rossi’s presents, as a way to make real the unreal. By using the analog concept, it has been allowed to work with different dialectics, such as relating memory to history, autobiography to civic history, and the individual with the collective experience.
The first Analog City was designed and painted by the architect-painter Arduino Cantafora in collaboration with Aldo Rossi in 1973 as part of La Tendenza group. The 7x2 meter oil canvas presented on the XV Milan Triennale, as the end of the of the exhibition of the Italian cities (Rome, Milan, Venice, etc.) as an Analog City that summaries all the memories of a journey through the exhibition. A center perspective of a public space through multiple streets, composed by a series of real buildings, but in different places and time, now share a common ground on this painting. It is composed of 11 buildings from which they are part historical, other part architectural from the early 20 century and Rossi’s own projects: The Monumento ai Partigiani in Segrate and Quartiere Gallaratese in Milano by A. Rossi, Casa sulla Michaelerplatz in Vienna by A. Loos, Mole Antonelliana in Torino by A. Antonelli, Mausoleo tronco-conico by E.L. Boulée, Pantheon in Roma, Piramide Cestia in Roma, Grosztadt di Hilberseimer, Fabbrica AEG di Berlino, P. Behrens, Casa del Fascio di Como by G. Terragni and Villa Reale di Monza by G. Piermarini. In the painting, we can start looking some perspective modification in these elements presented, breaking with the traditional Renaissance scheme. This idea of modification will be later used and exploited in the second Analog City of 1976. The lack of people presented in this frame gives to it an oneiric atmosphere, a space of fantasy. This could be transformed into the main critic. All the buildings are monuments, and there is a lack of texture that brings everything together as a city, the monuments are present next to it, but without a generic city texture that links them in a more complex system. As a Chirico’s paintings, the Analog City has a nostalgic light that gives us the idea of an abandoned or deserted city where the only thing that is left are the buildings and objects with their meanings staring at each other. As a contrast, we can use Canaletto’s capriccio with Palladian buildings, as a representation that has a dynamic urban life, that works as texture bringing the composition together.
The Analog City of 1976, was a collective work made by Aldo Rossi, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart and Eraldo Consolascio at the ETH in Zurich. As a visual piece for the Europa-America: Centro storico-suburbio at the 1976 Biennale di Venezia, Rossi propose a theory of design in a single, and collectively produced image. The technique of collage allows collaboration and the creation of this city as an arrangement of multiple memories, references, and projects displayed all together as a single composition. The collage is more suggestive than concrete because it referees to memories, objects, and events. Is more dynamic than stable, because of the superimposition of the images. It represents more a process that an end result, the collage could continue evolving with time, and this gives an open-ended characteristic. Rossi highlights the importance of this open-ended process as a possibility for cross contamination of meanings between elements. The 43 projects presented in the composition are a mixture of references from rationalism, the Neues Bauen, neo-platonicism, the architecture of the enlightenment, vernacular construction of the Ticino, Piranese’s carcieri, and baroque paintings with Rossi’s personal projects such as the Gallaratese housing units, the Beach huts and the Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena. This has created a city that has been developed and evolved through years, without a definitive program, but with types of buildings that defines the city. “As reported by Rossi’s former students at the ETH, he proposed that architectural images should be located outside the dominant references used at the school, and more generally, outside the international context of architectural production at the time”[4] .
In the creation of the Analog City, Rossi’s used the concept of memory as a catalog of elements that are merged with fantasy in order to create a new order and meaning for his projects and the city. As an example, Rossi states “The tower of my Venetian theater might be a lighthouse or a clock; the campanile might be a minaret or one of the towers of the Kremlin: the analogies are limitless, seen, as they are, against the background of this preeminently Analogous City”[5]. For Rossi, the catalog rediscovers a secret and unexpected history and use of the image. The idea that memories can be accumulated on images on paper and can be used in different form while their original meaning is lost because of time. This allows him to use the collage of multiple photocopies taken in its majority from Bernhard Hoesli’s book collection as the technique used for the composition of the Analog City. He states “Once everything has stopped forever, there is something to see: the little backgrounds of the yellowish photos, the unexpected appearance of an interior, the very dust on an image in which one recognizes the value of time”[6]. With this notion appears the concept of forgetting and the ruin as a filter used in its memory to forget the mundane and just leave what is important to be used in his project. Another concept present in Rossi’s Analog city is the negation of scale. With the dissolution of scale in the analog process, there is a return to the very same humanist position first proposed in Alberti’s reciprocal metaphor of the house and the city: “The city is like a large house, and the house, in turn, is like a small city”[7]. As an example, in the Analog City of 76’, we can see the mixture of scales used in the elements presented in the composition that suggests different points of views for the same element. As an example, it is possible to identify a project such the Rossi’s Moka Coffee Maker transformed into a building in the city, or part of Rossi’s Spazio Chiuso, an internal view that features a man looking outside a window with a lamp above of him, is transforming the lamp into a city plaza and the window frame into a square building with 4 courtyards. All this gives a new interpretation to an existing object in relation to their context in the Analog City.
The technique of representation of the Analog City is fundamental because it shares the notions that Rossi wanted to express in his theory. As a technique allows to relate things in a new order and creating new meanings. He states “The emergence of relations among things, more than the things themselves, always gives rise to new meanings”[8]. For him, nothing can be beautiful, nor a person, a thing or a city if it signifies nothing but its own use, and the creation of beauty comes in the creation of new meanings from the contamination in its comparison. Because of this, we can state that the second Analog City of 1976 achieves a conceptual design more precise than the first one. Both share the quality of been created through a composition of existing buildings in Rossi’s memory, but the collage as a technique allows a better tie of the elements, creating of different scales and perspective, allowing the use of plans, elevations, and details, making it more dynamic and powerful as a composition. In contrast, the painting as a single view perspective is limited to the first-person view, lacking the fabric that ties these monuments altogether.
In conclusion, the silence made by Rossi about the theory behind the Analog City is an analog declaration in itself, leaving one single image as a response to his theory. In this sense, this essay appears as a treason to Rossi’s idea with the Analog City as a self-declaration work of intentions. By defragmenting Rossi’s composition, we can understand his theory as an open-ended system, which is a declaration of freedom in design by using the dialectic of the logos an analog. The Analog City as design theory without instructions allows multiple speculations in the present and future, giving us a project without conclusion. As the Analog City, Rossi has taken away the time and place out of his design theory, in which anyone can reach it, reinterpreted and applied. Rossi has left us to discuss the Analog City as a monument, as the building in the city that has lost its meaning, and there is nobody to explain it, just like a skeleton that stands out by itself as a creation of the past, but that still finds it’s meaning in the present.
Bibliography
Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City.
Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography.
Szacka, Léa-Catherine. Aldo Rossi, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Eraldo Consolascio. Radical Pedagogies.
Rossi, Aldo. The Analogous City: panel.
Rodighiero, Daria. The Analogous City, The Map.
Projects presented in the Analog City of 1976.
Knossos palace, Crete, 15th-16th Century BC, Bouleuterion, Mileto, 2nd Century BC, Church of Santa Costanza, Roma, 4th Century, Chapter House of York Minster, York, 1230-1472, Mosque-madrasa of Murad I, _ rst-_ oor, Bursa, 14th Century, Bayezid II Külliye, Edirne, 1488, Donato Bramante, Tempietto of San Pietro in Montorio, Roma, 1502, Michelangelo, Laurentian Library, Firenze, 1525-1571, Giovanni Battista Caporali, Drawing of Vitruvius’ city, 1536, Andrea Palladio, Palazzo _ iene, Vicenza, 1542, Galileo Galilei, Drawing of Pleiades Constellation, 1610, Tanzio da Varallo, David and Goliath, ca 1625, Francesco Borromini, San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Roma, 1638-1641, Paulaner Monastery, Nová Paka, 1654-1732, Francesco de Sanctis, Alessandro Specchi, Spanish Steps, Roma, 1725, George Bähr, Frauenkirche, Dresden, 1726-1743, Augustin-Charles d’Aviler, Figures of geometry principles, 1738, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Plan of the Campus Martius in Rome, 1746-1778, Giovanni Battista Piranesi, _ e Prison V, the lion bas-reliefs, 1746-1778, Andrea Palladio, Doric column, 1786, Giuseppe Pistocchi, Project for a monument-barrack on Mont Cenis, 1813, Dufour Map, _ rst edition, 1864, Giuseppe Terragni, Project for the Danteum, 1934, Le Corbusier, _ e chapel of Notre Dame du Haut, Ronchamp, 1954, Gianfranco Caniggia, Como map, 1963, Aldo Rossi, Square and monument to the partisans, Segrate (MI), 1965, Giorgio Grassi, Aldo Rossi, Project of San Rocco housing unit, Monza (MB), 1966, Aldo Rossi, Project of the square, Sannazzaro de’ Burgondi (PV), 1967, Aldo Rossi, M. Fortis, M. Scolari, Project of the town hall, Scandicci (FI), 1968, Aldo Rossi, Gallaratese housing unit, Milano, 1969-70, Aldo Rossi, Beach huts, 1970, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena, 1971, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Tonini House, Torricella, 1972-1974, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Single-family houses, Broni (PV), 1973, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Villa, Borgo Ticino, 1973, Aldo Rossi, Moka Co_ ee Maker, 1975, Aldo Rossi, Spazio Chiuso, interno, 1974, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Restoration project of Castel Grande, Bellinzona, 1974, Aldo Rossi, Gianni Braghieri, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Project for connecting the walls to the main door of Castel Grande, Bellinzona, 1974, Aldo Rossi, Max Bosshard, Gianni Braghieri, Project for the regional administrative center, Trieste, 1974, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, House, Vezio, 1975, Brontallo Ground Floor, survey by Max Bosshard, Eraldo Consolascio and Orlando Pampuri, 1974, Corippo Elevation, after the work of Luigi Snozzi and Henk Block, 1979.
[1] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 18,19.
[2] Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. 8,9.
[3] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 82.
[4] Szacka, Léa-Catherine. Aldo Rossi, Bruno Reichlin, Fabio Reinhart, Eraldo Consolascio. Radical Pedagogies.
[5] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 67.
[6] Idem. 47.
[7] Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. 9.
[8] Rossi, Aldo. A Scientific Autobiography. 19.