By Marcantonio Ragone
Aldo Rossi was one of the great renewers of the form and ideology of contemporary architecture. His metaphysical poetry and his cult of geometry and memory professed through the archetypal forms of architecture made him the unsurpassed master of italian postmodernism. The profound sense of monumentality in his work was achieved by the use of stone, embodied in the most distinctive elements of the classical tradition.
Aldo Rossi linked his work as in product design closely to Apuan marble with Rilievo, an all-marble table that clearly expressed his aptitude for both architecture and design. Renzo Piano explained this effectively in an interview about Aldo Rossi with Claudia Conforti. "There was his skill at dismantling things. I also tend to dismantle things. Of course, I dismantle them differently. Aldo dismantled the acquired memory of things, their acquired image, fixed in the imagination, and worked only on that. By contrast I take things apart materially, the way kids do when they dismantle a radio set, taking it to pieces. Aldo dismantled the image of the radio set. But the process is the same: first we remove the object, take it apart, then we reassemble it in our own way."
The mechanism of manipulation of the image and what it represents in the collective imagination, clearly described by Piano, then appears all the clearer when you focus on the case that led to the creation of the first Rilievo. Example number 1 was designed by Rossi himself. He produced it to make up for his inadvertent breakage of a similar wooden table, as confirmed by the owners of Up Group (which grew out of Up & Up, from whom they inherited the product). The firm has never ceased to sell it since. So one of the more traditional home furnishings, a classic wooden kitchen table of the kind found in old houses in the countryside, a symbol of everyday life, was "dismantled" and became a real icon, one capable of celebrating the sense of tradition by becoming a "monument" precisely through the use of marble, the only material capable of fulfilling the designer's symbolic intentions. A similar inspiration animated the Milanese designer when he designed Tabularium for the same company. This was a low table colored with the black and gold of Portoro marble or the picturesque orange-red of a Persian Travertine. Then there was the Elba series of photo frames in White Carrara marble, in their turn redeemed from banal anonymity and elevated to the rank of noteworthy objects.
The use of marble in Rilievo, as it was presented, was naturally related on a different and broader scale to the hotly debated issue of the monument. Rossi made a strong contribution to the reintegration of the monument back into the panorama of architecture in the second half of the 20th century, after it had been banished by the Modern Movement.
"I have always thought of architecture as a monument," he declared almost programmatically in the report accompanying his project for the reconstruction of the Teatro Paganini in Parma, and applied himself to this theme with particular devotion bringing back "into discussion the problem, always connected with the status of sculpture, of monumentality and its public, urban role of signification in the context."
The Monument to Sandro Pertini illustrates effectively how closely Rossi observed this principle. The intent of "testimony/memory" became the occasion for an urban project that would add a new landmark and a new organization of space to Piazza Croce Rossa in Milan, where the work is located. The monument takes the form of a parallelepiped featuring a fountain, topped by a slit and with a stepped back, without any direct reference to the figure of Pertini. The red porphyry paving of the piazza forms the backdrop to the volume faced with rectangular slabs (measuring 25 x 50 x 2 cm) of Candoglia marble, a material with historical associations, having been used for the Milan cathedral. Blocks replace the plaques at the corners so as to mask the thinness of the facing material. The extraction of marble from the quarries at Candoglia, a village near the town of Mergozzo on the Toce River, a tributary of Lake Maggiore, was difficult and expensive at the time when the cathedral was built, but became economically viable because of the savings made possible by its transportation on the inland waterways, across Lake Maggiore, the Ticino River and Milan's network of canals to what is today Via Laghetto, whose name recalls the little dock where the blocks of marble were unloaded, just behind the cathedral when it was being built. Candoglia marble conferred a sense of monumentality on the project, while creating a harmony between the new presence and its setting.
The villa of the Alessi family at Suna on Lake Maggiore is a further example of Rossi's concern with messages from the past. Here it led him to tackle the typology of the Romantic villas that arose on the shores of the lake in large numbers in the late 19th century. Scagliola masonry was a cheap technique used in Alto Verbano and Valsesia for building walls by incorporating scraps of granite, freestone and gneiss. It is a feature of the project and together with ceramic tiles is the hallmark of the exterior of the villa. Characteristically Rossi again drew on history with the scagliola technique, not merely as a quotation from the past but restoring it, after revising its features, and presenting it in a new light, no longer as a wall but a facing material, hence as pure representation.
Rossi entrusts himself to pure representation also when it is a case of redeeming a tract of the city without order and quality, like the Fukuoka district where he designed and built the already celebrated Hotel Il Palazzo. The volume of the building, with its bright colors, contrasts sharply with its setting, yet it becomes a landmark and an outstanding source of regeneration. Rossi seems to recast the classic type of building, in particular by questioning the uniqueness of its vocabulary. Here he proposes a "bifrontal" architecture, which is traditionally functional in the side facades, pierced by beautiful windows, and monumental on the facade overlooking the river, inflected by a regular sequence of columns in red Persian Travertine and green metal beams that frame fields of blind masonry also faced with red Travertine.
Again the effect of monumentality is achieved through the use of stone, embodied in the most typical elements of its classical tradition: staircases, columns and walls, here composed to create space for the chiaroscuro effects created by the interplay of light on the skillfully articulated planes.
Rossi's skill at interpreting the category of the monumental in modern ways was expressed to the full when he was commissioned to undertake the difficult restructuring of the Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa, as widely documented in the following contribution by Patrizia Marica and the technical specifications of the project.
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