Aldo Rossi’s work, as well-known as it is, as mysterious as it remains, has plenty to deliver yet again to the architectural debate, for it is highly theoretical without becoming a theory on its own. Architecture for museums (1966) and A Scientific Autobiography (1981) represents a difficult pairing where the architect’s final call seems to have turned into the distant memory of its predecessor. And as remembering is to love again, these two texts remain deeply related to each other. They best represent the architect’s work, his factual attempt at the making of architecture. In that sense, the architectural project is the series rather than a project, writing remaining the ultimate proof of an incomplete architecture if only realized in the physical world. Thus, the architectural project might become the description of its own project.

By engaging with Rossi’s insistence on certain seemingly vague (and thus non-theoretical) themes through these two key pieces of a theory for architecture, the essay aims to elaborate on the need for architects to refer to something external—something that, on one hand, reveals the immense universe of aspirations they seek to follow and, on the other, signifies the acceptance of architecture’s incompleteness. No desire for an actual theory is formulated and the essay may just be laying there, but ambition remains a theoretical question that architecture must address, and an architectural theory can be more resilient by alluding only indirectly to architecture. In that regard, reading Rossi’s Scientific Autobiography can evoke a sense of unease in the reader, who finds himself unintentionally stepping into the author’s intimate world without prior awareness or expectation, ultimately engaging with what feels like the architect’s personal journal. However, beyond Rossi’s obvious provocation, the architect intimately reveals himself—not only to the reader but also to the public debate. There is no irony in his approach; rather, he offers himself wholly and unreservedly. To remember is to love again. And we should remember Rossi’s lesser-discussed essay Architecture for museums.

While today’s condition of architecture seems to be inevitably faced with the question of reuse, addressing existing structures open up a field for experimentation towards the definition of composite spaces—hence going hand in hand with the rethinking of their functions.

Nevertheless this condition might bring architecture in a difficult position in which form risks to remain as abstract as unable to intervene with what’s already there, whereas punctual and constrained decisions, appearing as crutches, reduce architecture in scale and blur the intention to a point that it tends to fade away.

Hopefully, historical precedents such as the reused columns of Bramante’s Tempietto or Terragni’s “Biological Pillar” offer us clear answers to pragmatical needs. However, by introducing reuse as one among other elements of the project they ultimately eliminate the whole tour de force in the completion of the project.

Thus, rather than to find ones freedom in the expression of that limitation, incompleteness acts as a positive argument for form to question its boundaries. In that regard, the “Colonne-cadre” is exposed as the argument, and aims to rethink the relation the project has with its immediate context. Developed in a research project on the Lemanic arc in Switzerland, the project reactualizes the medieval fabric of the Lavaux, revealing its spatial potential by a détournement changing its condition.

It is eventually a principle for a composite construction that, by reflecting on the nature of its surroundings permits a new hypothesis on typology and function through the definition of intermediary spaces.

In the last year of architecture studies at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, students are asked to undertake a research called énoncé théorique. A task astonishingly open in terms of what it can contain and about the form it should take.
This paves the way to the questioning of the role research has, or could have, in the architectural discipline and ultimately brings writing as one amongst other tools for the project.
Of course we stand here in a difficult position for we lie on the threshold between education and practice. And for a writing probably never really exists on its own right—or never exists without a practice so to say—the following texts are necessarily making use of a certain degree of abstraction.
Indeed by suggesting hypothetical takes on an architect writing, this series aims to define a shared knowledge as cultural common ground.
Hence, rather than seeing the text as a crutch for ones own argument, it is understood as a specific tool amongst others, with its rules and goals, eventually allowing research to be undertaken with all the more conviction, passion and precision.

The book presents a double portrait: on one side we have Manfredo Tafuri offering us the critical tools to approach contemporaneity, on the other we take fragments of Le Corbusier to witness their resolution into the project of architecture. Open Hand Open Castle compiles a collection of notes making an argument on ideology and form, with the aim to find a new link between the chose humaine, the social stance and the culture of architecture.

Download the book Open Hand, Open Castle (PDF).

Before the Swiss Box (notes from architecture nº2) engages with a specific period in the work of Herzog & de Meuron, in which from 1984 to 1987 the firm built four projects different in scales and programs with the very same attitude towards the city.

During the years following the Swiss renewal of the 1980’s, Swiss German architecture gradually fell into the exaltation of its own apartness; a condition which led its production to establish itself as an international benchmark known as the ‘Swiss box’. Rather than blending this entire scene in a minimalist parti pris that made the country so successful internationally, Before the Swiss Box nuances a piece of its origins, in which the early work of Herzog & de Meuron offers a serie of projects different in scales and programs having the same attitude towards the city : by displaying layers of diffusion and dissimulation, the building’s initial harshness softens and brings the context in as part of positive collisions.

Download the book Before the Swiss Box (PDF).