This essay isn't really about Aldo Rossi, at least factually. There are no claims for any furtherance of academic research into his work and buildings here. Instead, this is a series of thoughts about a simple question that occurred to me as I was reading through his second major book, the introspective Scientific Autobiography. Why was it so utterly different from Rossi's magnum opus - the one everybody knows - The Architecture of the City? That was filled with scientifical terms and methodology, and seemed so formal, so structuralist. What had it to do with the later book, elegiac and concerned with odd moments in an individual's life? I was hugely attracted to the Autobiography's sense of grace and the possibility things had to have both beauty and strangeness connected with them. But whys and hows are of the utmost importance to an architect. So this essay follows a hunch about the philosophical underpinning of this sea-change in Rossi's feelings (as they come across in his writing), and how such a change could be justified.

Describing the project begun with the book L’Architettura della Citta, Aldo Rossi wrote “the analogous city meant a system of relating the city to established elements from which other artefacts could be derived. At the same time, the suppression of precise boundaries in time and space allowed the design the same kind of tension we find in memory”. The original book provoked flurries of related research and writing. For this he is quite directly responsible: paragraphs on varied topics end with pleas for his insights to receive further study, “this work must be carried forward”, “this area, I believe, deserves greater consideration”. One of these, now covered in some depth, concerned utopias and ideal cities. The eerie, Platonic forms that repeat themselves in his work may be destined to be seen in the same light as the endless geometric, fortified city designs of the Renaissance; abstractions as attempts to connect to something higher, to God, or gods. That is entirely speculation, entertaining perhaps, but idle. The salient use of any connection between this architect and these cities of the mind is that the latter can be a weapon for dissecting the thought of the former, as dialectical tools. Armed with these imaginary cities we shall first tease out some tensions in Rossi’s thought surrounding memory and design. The preference is for the literary insight (or at least that from outside the architectural profession): this is to reduce the impression that the process is anything other than polemical. Certain fundamentals are to be teased out, the better to see what underlies, and what undermines, Rossi’s thinking on memory.

A

Since we overcame the error of supposing that the forgetting we are familiar with signified a destruction of the memory-trace - that is, its annihilation - we have been inclined to take the opposite view; that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish - that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances (when, for instance, regression goes back far enough) it can once more be brought to light.

B

So I leave you with the thought that buildings may be less solid than they seem, existing invisibly in the mind of the architect before they are born; remembered invisibly down the ages in the memories of the generations.

C

“Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are”

When reading, in De Oratore, Cicero describing how a speaker might remember his argument by placing his points in places in a room or house, real or imaginary, we are seduced. Such a vividly spatial technique employed by artists of a profession now defunct but fondly remembered - Giordano Bruno, the romantic lead of Yates’s book, was burned at the stake for such ‘magic tricks’ - is hard to forget. It is thus that Ruskin would argue that “we may live without architecture, and worship without her, but we cannot remember without her” (Ruskin 197). A meditation on this might well be illuminating but it would risk setting unsure foundations: Aldo Rossi would no doubt admonish us for setting the grounds so narrow. He preferred more abstract ‘permanences’ to any specific notions about ‘Architecture’. The definition of ‘architecture’ should then be extended from mnemonic cathedrals to the smell of raisins drying on the windowsill in Gaston Bachelard’s childhood home, or at least the setting for this potential.

Thus the idea enters the architect’s mind: a house of memory; being an architect, the wish is to know how to design one. Like Rossi, he recalls Maurice Halbwachs describing “the stones one finds in certain Roman houses which have come from very ancient buildings: their antiquity cannot be established by their form or their appearance but only by the fact that they still show traces of their old features”. The ambiguity between the meanings of ‘form’, ‘appearance’ and ‘features’ are enough to excite the creative imagination. If the very fact of design is enough to give the mute stones meaning, perhaps to tie to them quite specific meanings, then the designer wields great power indeed.

Four strips, rooms stretched out over a decline and propped on stilts like a set of shelves: a series of houses that attach to a structure at right angles that connects them physically and in their routines. Everything that happens is defined by the strips, everything remembered intricately linked to them. And the architect knew it: “the corridor was a strip of space that seemed surrounded and gripped by private acts, unforeseeable occasions, love affairs, repentances”.

Italo Calvino wrote an inspirational story for those with these ambitions: Zora, a city which remains in the mind point by point. “This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world’s most learned men are those who have memorised Zora.”