Aldo Rossi – The Analogous City, The Map

Exhibition place: Archizoom, EPFL
Exhibition from February 29 until March 23, 2016
Opening hours: Mon – Fri 9:30 – 17:30; Sat 14:00 – 18:00

— The digital installation —

This new publication of The Analogous City, an artwork produced by Aldo Rossi, Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart for the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1976, is part of a museographic installation for the exhibition Aldo Rossi - The Window of the Poet at the EPFL in Lausanne.

To gauge and explore this seminal work, Archizoom relied on Dario Rodighiero, candidate on the Doctoral Programme for Architecture and Sciences of the Cities, and designer at the Digital Humanities Lab (DHLAB) at EPFL. Conceived as a genuine urban project, The Analogous City displays an aggregation of architectures drawn from collective and personal memories. What happens if we isolate the forms that Aldo Rossi and his friends so consciously placed in relation to each other? Rodighiero simply decomposed it into the original references and then returned the pieces to the artwork, thus allowing us to simultaneously see the work and its visual vocabulary.

An application based on augmented reality has been created to work in tandem with this publication by displaying the complete references belonging to the collage on different layers suspended over the artwork. By downloading the free application and installing it on your tablet, you can recreate the interaction of the museum installation whenever and wherever you are.

— The exhibition —

Through the Italian architect Aldo Rossi’s work, one enters into a world where architectural ingenuity intertwines with artistic and philosophical concepts. Without this unconventional oeuvre, architectural prints would probably have remained a peripheral phenomenon.
On the occasion of the 20th anniversary of Aldo Rossi’s museum in Maastricht, the Bonnefantenmuseum produced an exhibition on the fascinating Opera Grafica of this versatile architect and artist. Along with the exhibition, titled La finestra del poeta after a favourite subject of Rossi’s, Silvana Editoriale has published the book Aldo Rossi: Opera Grafica, a work conducted in close cooperation with the museum and the Fondazione Aldo Rossi in Milan, and ARCHIZOOM is publishing a map and an application on the Città analoga.

The importance of Aldo Rossi (1932-1997) for the development of architectural culture can hardly be underestimated. Through his unique and complex network of theoretical works, buildings and projects, designs, teaching and exhibiting activities, and a vast production of drawings and prints, he was one of the most influential actors in the reorientation of architecture in the previous century. His production of prints cannot easily be compared to that of any other artist or architect, since it does not establish a ‘private niche’. On the contrary, his prints show an unconventional reaction to impulses from within (personal reflection) and from without (relationships with friends and commissioners).

The relatively small group of prints displayed at Opera Grafica has scarcely ever – undeservedly – been studied. But when considered within the broader perspective of the ‘rediscovery’ of architectural prints of the 1970s, Rossi’s printmaking has had a determining role in this particular development. His prints, which are closely related to his drawings, display a fascinating relationship between unique and reproduction works, relating conceptually to Rossi’s influential idea of architecture as modus operandi – where the process is at least as important as the product.

Between 1973 (the year in which he curated the international Architectural Section of the XV’s Triennial of Milan) until his death, Rossi enriched his oeuvre with over 100 prints. Though interested in the mysteries and possibilities of various graphic techniques, Rossi was not a trained printmaker. His prints often show a disconcerting variety of styles and techniques: some are experiments with printmaking; others are technically conventional or signed photomechanical reproductions.