Rossi's Housing Block in Gallaratese, Milan

This housing block made Aldo Rossi famous. In the seventies it was published in magazines all over the world as a premonition of the architecture to come: an architecture solidly rooted in history (Rossi often cited traditional Italian housing compounds as his inspiration) and an architecture that assumed an active role in the formation of urban communities (the building's porticos and plazas were conceived as spaces for people to gather and interact with each other).

Unfortunately, the architecture advanced by Rossi came, opened the door to stylistic irony and historicist sentimentality, and then disappeared from architecture magazines (and became a marginal phenomena in architectural practice).

Visiting the Gallaratese compound today is enlightening in many ways. Its directness is still a compelling argument for an architecture whose use can be easily identified--an architecture that points towards the archetype of its typology--and can thus be understood in relation to other buildings, as a piece of a larger urban context. 

The problem is that the context where this housing block was built did not develop quite as Rossi would have wished. Other housing complexes in the area are organized in heartless apartment towers and slabs surrounded by parking lots and empty space. The Gallaratese district lacks an articulated urban fabric. The Rossi compound is thus isolated--its isolation is heightened by a wall that surrounds it, and warning signs at its entrances that caution against trespassing. Rossi's public spaces are not so public anymore. 

Visiting the Gallaratese housing complex is also enlightening because it lets you see what books and magazines often do not--Rossi's block does not make much sense when seen separately from Carlo Aymonio's. Aymonino and Rossi evidently worked together in the design of a single complex, with common structural and spatial patterns. Rossi's slab is enveloped by Aymonino's V-shaped building; the public areas between them serve as articulations. 

Aymonino's building in this complex did not become quite as famous as Rossi's, perhaps because it is more complicated in its design, and heavier, in a way that recalls Rudolph's brutalism. Rossi's design, on the other hand, was direct, to the point, and genuinely different from what was being built at the time.

San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena

This early work by Aldo Rossi remains unfinished, and there appear to be plans to modify it considerably. In fact, part of it has already been modified. Yet this does not seem to bother many. The woman at the entrance of the cemetery said that few people visited, and that she could hardly understand why I did. In her opinion the building was ugly and depressing. Similarly, I met some Milan architects while in Italy who could not believe I would rather visit works by Rossi than others by more fashionable architects, say Libeskind or Fuksas. They thought of the cemetery as nothing more than an extravagant curiosity.

I was bothered by the general lack of appreciation for this building, which I consider one of the most significant of the second half of the 20th century. Few have achieved to make architecture metaphysical. Entering the cemetery is like entering the world of platonic forms, where time (and thus decay) does not exist. The visitor is inevitably confronted with death, but also with the hope for eternity; the cemetery's simple shapes and spatial configuration separate visitors from their everyday lives and introduce them into something like a Cartesian plane where truths are constant and irrevocable.

Rossi's exploration of the simple shapes and architectural elements is also a statement on architecture itself. While Libeskind and Fuksas might spend days and weeks and months making sure their buildings do not look like buildings, Rossi struggled throughout his career to apprehend and communicate in his designs the essence of the basic components of the built environment--walls, columns, floor and roof slabs, and hallways, porticos, windows and doorways. Hence the cemetery's repetitive and exaggerated gestures (which many fail to see as more than caricatures). In this way, Rossi was similar to the Russian Suprematists and the Dutch Neoplasticists, who painted compositions of lines and planes in basic colors to achieve spiritual effects.