Aldo Rossi’s Città Analoga: Legend of a legend

A curious character haunts certain of Aldo Rossi’s drawings: a sketched figure, dark or clothed in black.  He stands before a window against the sunlight, in a bare room dimly lit by a lamp suspended from the ceiling.  In the foreground, a bottle of wine and a piece of fruit sit on a table.  There is an ambiguity to his gaze: does he look through the window to the world beyond, or does he stare at the frame of the window itself?

This obscure character figures prominently in the composition entitled Città Analoga, first presented at the 1976 Venice Biennale.  The image, and by extension, the idea of the Analogical City that it embodies, is central to an ongoing reflection taken up by Rossi at the end of the 60s, recurring throughout the 70s, and brutally interrupted in the early 80s.  By focusing on an examination of the Città Analoga, this lecture hopes to contribute to a historical and theoretical sitting of Rossi’s theory of the analogical imagination of the city.

Jean-Pierre Chupin is an architecture graduate from Nantes (France), and Portsmouth (UK). He has a Masters in History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University and a PhD from the Université de Montréal. He taught at the Université du Québec in Montreal, Toulouse School of Architecture and Lyon School of Architecture before joining the Université de Montréal. He is the co-founder and scientific director of the Laboratoire d’Étude de l’Architecture Potentielle ( www.leap.umontreal.ca ), and heads up the design and updating work on the Canadian Competitions Catalogue ( www.ccc.umontreal.ca ) and the European Competitions Database ( www.arclab.umontreal.ca/EUROPAN-FR ).
More generally, his research work focuses on knowledge by analogy in architecture (history, theory, practice and teaching) and on tectonics. Alongside Cyrille Simonnet and Kenneth Frampton, he has published Le projet tectonique (InFolio, Golion, 2005). He is currently completing a work on the analogy spectrum in architecture which will appear under the title Analogies, matière d’architecture, in the collection Projet et Théorie which he is co-directing with Paolo Amaldi (InFolio, 2009).

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About the Lecture Series:

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Some cities are divided by war, why?
Some cities are automobile cities, why?
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