Sketch made at Scotnish, Argyll (December 1980) and acquired in 1981 on behalf of Deutsches Architektur Museum (DAM), Frankfurt-am-Main, by Professor KLOTZ.
This sketch, executed in ink on absorbent paper, at home in Scotland over Christmas 1980, primarily served to record what I felt were some regrettably missed semantic opportunities, given the ‘turn’ in hand.
Firstly, Aldo ROSSI’s nascent desire to integrate plastically developed cornice mouldings (rather than flat banding as painted on Teatro del Mondo) to crown the erect parallelepiped forms, that he ostensibly – proudly – derived from FILARETE and particularly BRAMANTINO. (The latter’s astonishing – externally squared but internally octagonal – chapel was only a stone’s throw from the office, and the former’s Ospedale Maggiore a further stone’s throw beyond that.)
Secondly, in view of the fact that our projected buildings would stand on the former site of Albert SPEER’s razed NS headquarters, extra potency and significance would be acquired by the two-storey cross-mullioned loggias (reinventing ROSSI’s leitmotiv of the four-square window) designed to provide required external living space without weakening the fortress-like character of the squat masonry towers.
This specific two-storey loggia treatment had been devised by myself and Gianni BRAGHIERI for this project, to meet the external living space requirement. Adolf LOOS’ house for Tristan TZARA in Paris had given the cue.
While AR was initially put out, complaining that we had disposed him of his project, dismissing it as ‘commercial’ to the likes of Pierluigi NICOLIN, who complemented him on our competition scheme, the two-storey loggia motif would be later recycled in other ROSSI projects, somewhat indiscriminately.
I myself would later attempt to integrate it, enfin !, in a François BELLET project, principally of my devising, for SCI des Trois Bornes in Paris.
Come springtime 1981, on visiting my via Meravigli garret apartment where the sketch was pinned to the wall, Prof. Heinrich KLOTZ (in Milan to purchase models and drawings from Studio di Architettura) instantly offered to buy the drawing off me, and fixed the price.
Rarely has anyone been so quick in spotting the second-degree undertones and layers of potential readings with which I actually like to think all architects have a duty to invest their work, consciously or not, if it is not to remain banally servile to unthinking repetitive tradition or manipulable by other, para-architectural, agendas.
Today the item is catalogued by DAM under number 243-001-000.
Related or parent pages :
Interventions By Date (reverse chronology)
Aldo Rossi (employer)
opus incertum 