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First published under the title A Scientific Autobiography [Rossi 1981a], as part of the Oppositions Books series by the prestigious editors, Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton, translated with great lyrical sensitivity by Lawrence Venuti and commented upon with extraordinary critical acuity by Vincent Scully (author of a memorable afterword entitled Ideology in Form), Aldo Rossi’s A Scientific Autobiography (a story in a personal key to the relationship with architecture and the profession of architect) is an absolutely atypical book, because it manifests itself as a diary, a notebook and a memoir, all at once (read more).

Nell’archivio dell’Accademia di Belle Arti “Pietro Vannucci” di Perugia sono conservati due fax memorabili: memorabili sia perché sono firmati da due personalità di chiara fama (Sol LeWitt e Bruno Corà) sia perché, solidalmente, restituiscono un vero e proprio manifesto teorico capace di sanare la frattura che separa tradizionalmente l’architettura e la storia dell’ar- te sotto l’egida del disegno inteso come forma di pensiero [...]

Albeit with discontinuity, the history of representation is punctuated by imaginative impulses apparently lacking operational results, and for this reason dismissed as caprices or at most as divertissements, but which conversely, if taken up and developed, could have opened up new horizons. [read more]

Exactly ten years ago, the Pinksummer gallery in Genoa hosted an exhibition in the Cortile Maggiore of the Palazzo Ducale in which two architects’ collectives, Gruppo A12 and Baukuh, questioned the possible future (or perhaps, more appropriately, the possible futures) of the Ligurian capital. And they did so by proposing projects and solutions that synergistically contaminated representational modes as varied as they were unusual: starting with the image chosen for the communication, namely that same angel, present in the Ribaudo family chapel of the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno, used by the rock band Joy Division for the cover of its single Love will tear us apart. [read more]

“The visionaries form a separate, singular, confused order, in which artists of very different talents and perhaps also of unequal ingenuity take their place. At times they manifest the freest and most daring aspects characterizing creative genius, a prophetic power fully concentrated on the most mysterious domains of the human rêverie, and the effects of a particular vision that profoundly alters the light, the proportions and even the density of the sensible world. One would say that they are uncomfortable within the limits of space and time. They interpret rather than imitate, and transfigure rather than interpret. They are not content with our world, and while the study of the forms found in it satisfies most artists, for them their formal study is only a provisional framework or, if you like, a starting point. […] At first glance, it seems that they invent at random, by fits and starts, subject to the despotic whim of a bizarre inspiration, and we are led to consider them as travelers who have come from very far away, and by indirect routes.” [Focillon 2006, p. 13] [read more]

Così come nell’arte giapponese del kintsugi, laddove i frammenti di ceramiche rotte vengono ricomposti mediante l’inserto di polvere d’oro, nell’installazione Canapa Nera, presentata dalla Regione Umbria in occasione della Milano Design Week 2018, la preziosità del materiale è stata sostanziata da un mix alchemico composto amalgamando le speranze che vibrano nelle fibre della canapa nera della Valnerina con i ricordi che impregnano le macerie dei muri diruti di Norcia a seguito degli eventi sismici che nel 2016 hanno sconvolto l’Italia Centrale. Canapa Nera era un lungo muro bifronte, caratterizzato da un lato da un polittico di undici grandi tele di canapa ispirate alle trame e ai colori della fioritura annuale del Pian Grande e dall’altro lato da un’esplosione caotica di macerie variegate il cui recupero ha comportato difficoltà tanto operative quanto interpretative, perché legate sia al prelievo sia all’individuazione delle tecniche di rilievo più idonee. Nell’ambito dello studio affrontato, la misurazione e la restituzione grafica delle singole macerie sono state finalizzate a esaltarne il valore identitario, celebrato attraverso la ricomposizione di un insieme frammentato, disseminato tra vuoti. Rendendo misurabile lo spazio poetico che marca lo scarto tra il dolore e la speranza. Così come nell’arte giapponese del kintsugi, laddove i frammenti di ceramiche rotte vengono ricomposti mediante l’inserto di polvere d’oro, nell’installazione Canapa Nera, presentata dalla Regione Umbria in occasione della Milano Design Week 2018, la preziosità del materiale è stata sostanziata da un mix alchemico composto amalgamando le speranze che vibrano nelle fibre della canapa nera della Valnerina con i ricordi che impregnano le macerie dei muri diruti di Norcia a seguito degli eventi sismici che nel 2016 hanno sconvolto l’Italia Centrale. Canapa Nera era un lungo muro bifronte, caratterizzato da un lato da un polittico di undici grandi tele di canapa ispirate alle trame e ai colori della fioritura annuale del Pian Grande e dall’altro lato da un’esplosione caotica di macerie variegate il cui recupero ha comportato difficoltà tanto operative quanto interpretative, perché legate sia al prelievo sia all’individuazione delle tecniche di rilievo più idonee. Nell’ambito dello studio affrontato, la misurazione e la restituzione grafica delle singole macerie sono state finalizzate a esaltarne il valore identitario, celebrato attraverso la ricomposizione di un insieme frammentato, disseminato tra vuoti. Rendendo misurabile lo spazio poetico che marca lo scarto tra il dolore e la speranza.

"Among Chuang-Tzu’s many skills, he was an expert draftsman. The king asked him to draw a crab. Chuang-Tzu replied that he needed five years, a country house, and twelve servants. Five years later the drawing was still not begun. ‘I need another five years’, said Chuang-Tzu. The king granted them. At the end of these ten years, Chuang-Tzu took up his brush and, in an instant, with a single stroke, he drew a crab, the most perfect crab ever seen”. [Calvino 1988, p. 53] Initially, when we thought up the program of side events with the members of the organising committee at the 41st International Conference of the Performance Disciplines/Congress of the Italian Drawing Union, hosted in 2019 by the University of Perugia and dedicated to the two-way relationship established between ar t and drawing, we thought of organising a sculpture exhibition. And, in particular, we imagined exhibiting en plein air, in the University gardens, replicas of three famous contemporary sculptures made with a 3D printer and characterised by provocative chromatic finishes. Sculptures like Dibuixar l’Espai by Pepe Diaz Azorin, The Man Who Measures the Clouds by Jan Fabre and Study of Perspective by Ai Weiwei.

First published under the title A Scientific Autobiography [Rossi 1981a], as part of the Oppositions Books series by the prestigious editors, Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton, translated with great lyrical sensitivity by Lawrence Venuti and commented upon with extraordinary critical acuity by Vincent Scully (author of a memorable afterword entitled Ideology in Form), Aldo Rossi’s A Scientific Autobiography (a story in a personal key to the relationship with architecture and the profession of architect) is an absolutely atypical book, because it manifests itself as a diary, a notebook and a memoir, all at once.

Two significant faxes can be found in the archive of the ‘Pietro Vannucci’ Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia: they are worthy of note both because they are signed by two well-known personalities (Sol LeWitt and Bruno Corà) and because they markedly represent a genuine manifesto which is theoretically capable of healing the fracture that traditionally separates architecture and art history in matters of drawing intended as a form of thought. In the first fax, dated March 22, 1995, LeWitt (at the time residing for long periods in Spoleto) tells his friend Bruno Corà (then professor of Art History in the Academy) about the delivery of the maquette of a work created specifically for Perugia [1]: an ‘open cube’ (the solid form most loved by LeWitt [2]) which, as an element of the exhibition project City and Art, aimed at injecting viral works into extra moenia urban areas of symbolic interest, was to be exhibited in the portico of the large public building built in those same years by Aldo Rossi and located on the western side of the Piazza Nuova in Fontivegge [3].