|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Aldo Rossi: Recomposing the Past: Creating Cities of the Future
| Article
# : |
13546 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1988 |
2,563 Words |
| Author
: |
Kenneth Powell
Kenneth Powell is an architecture writer for the London Daily
Telegraph. |
It was inevitable that the relentless decline of the Modern movement in architecture would lead to a revived interest in style. Paradoxically, however, the 1980s is an age without a true style of its own. In Europe, as much as in the United States, the leading practitioners appear to be walking point on a restless search for new fashions. Style is reduced to skin-deep decoration; architecture, on occasion, to a series of visual jokes--a trend exemplified by Robert Venturi's scheme for the National Gallery in London.
If Postmodernism appears to have lost its way and the superficial appeal of its decorative fancies to have waned, the explanation must lie, in part at least, with its failure to evolve a new approach to the design of towns and cities. As acute a critic as the Prince of Wales has been driven, in consequence, to propose the re-creation of pre-World War II streetscapes as the best approach to the future planning of the city of London.
Amid this confused and, to some extent, depressing scene, the work and influence of the Italian architect Aldo Rossi (b. 1931) assume a profound and growing significance. Rossi declared recently: "I have still a dream of great civil architecture; not the concordance of discords, but the city that is beautiful because of the wealth and variety it contains. I believe in the city of the future for this reason. It is a place where the fragments of something once broken are recomposed."
Rossi is a controversial figure who must be seen in the exhilarating, sometimes maddening, context of postwar Italian society, where political confusion and economic advance have gone hand in hand. A student of architecture in Milan at a time when the Modernist gospel reigned unchallenged, his political affiliations were with the Left. There was no conflict here--Modernism generally went hand in hand with "progressive" social theory. Yet the consequences of Rossi's travels as an exchange student behind the Iron Curtain were unexpected. "I loved everything about Russia," he later recalled. In particular, he was able to see merit in the widely despised art and architecture of the Stalin era as a practical alternative to "the entire petit-bourgeois culture of modern architecture." Ironically enough, some younger critics have decried Rossi's work as fascist, as if frightened and repelled by the reinstatement of emotional and associationist images so readily discarded by the Modernists.
Powerful and Poetic
The
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
