"I fili che uniscono l'analisi all'espressione". Il disegno di Aldo Rossi e l'arte del Novecento

Aldo Rossi numbered among the architects of the twentieth century most invested in extending his disciplinary field through drawing, thus creating a paper architecture that transcends the need for construction. This study analyses the key role of practices of drawing and painting in Rossi’s graphic work and highlights the kaleidoscopic influences that the architect absorbed from some of the most significant artistic currents of the twentieth century. From the early phase of his career in the second half of the 1940s until his death in 1997, Rossi experimented with multiple techniques of drawing and painting in the representation of his projects, but also in works not strictly related to construction practices. This gradually induced him to develop “analogue architecture”, which lives autonomously in the two-dimensional reality of paper. This contribution combines the analysis of Rossi’s writings, particularly I Quaderni azzurri and Autobiografia scientifica, with a parallel study of his graphic production in order to highlight the influences that different twentieth-century paintings exerted on Rossi’s work, whether drawn, designed or merely theorized: from the formative forces of Paul Klee to the metaphysics of the mundane informing the work of painters such as Giorgio de Chirico, Giorgio Morandi and Mario Sironi, from the surrealistic, collage-based compositional processes to the scenically illuminated realism of Angelo Morbelli and Edward Hopper. By placing drawing at the intersection of theoretical speculation and design activity, this study reveals the redemptive role Rossi attributed to the graphic medium as the only one capable of rescuing architecture from the irrepress­ibil­i­ty of change through its translation into the two-dimensionality of paper.