“L’architettura sono le architetture.”
The above quote from Aldo Rossi, loosely translated as “Architecture is (the) architecture(s)” kind of confused me when it was presented in class. Yet after reading the text accompaniment to Rossi’s The Analogous City Panel as well as the excerpt from his work “An Analogical Architecture,” I was able to understand what he meant by this a little bit more.
Rossi’s emphasis on the memory in buildings and the fact that a building should not be constrained by its function is evident in when in “An Analogical Architecture” he says “Regarding the question of memory, architecture is also transformed into autobiographical experience; places and things change with the superimposition of new meanings” (Rossi 2). I also liked his reference to Walter Benjamin’s quote “I am unquestionably deformed by relationships with everything that surrounds me” (Rossi 2). I could see how this quote parallels Rossi’s theory as well as his architecture because it is stating that meanings and functions are constantly evolving based on what is happening around oneself as a person or around a building or work of architecture. In a sense, how one studies capital A Architecture correlates how one perceives the built world architecture.
This connects to my blog post from last week in response to Rossi’s “The Architecture of the City” because I said that I feel as though Rossi allows the reader to decide what architecture is to them because it affects or, as Benjamin said, “deforms” everyone differently based on their background and the time at which one experiences a specific architecture.
Citations:
Rossi, Aldo. The Analogous City Panel, 1976.
Rossi, Aldo. An Analogical Architecture, 1976.
Rossi, Aldo. The Architecture of the City. Cambridge, MA: The MIT press, 1982.