Melancholia In The Work Of Aldo Rossi

Diogo Seixas Lopes’s study of Aldo Rossi, recently published, reveals the extraordinary capacity and depth of analysis of the Portuguese intellectual and architect, who died prematurely last year. Kenneth Frampton testifi es to the importance of this legacy

- Kenneth Frampton

It is a tragic fate that Diogo Seixas Lopes, a brilliant young Portuguese intellectual and the author of this profound study Melancholy and Architecture: On Aldo Rossi, should not have lived long enough to see the results of his work published. Melancholia, which is the main theme of the book, seems in retrospect to apply as much to the author as to Aldo Rossi, who was affected by this humour throughout his adult life. Progeny of the Milanese bourgeoisie, Rossi was evacuated to Como as an adolescent during the war and subsequently, after studying architecture, came to his maturity amid the fervent creativity and ideological turmoil of Italian reconstruction during the decades immediately following the end of the war in 1945. Within this scene he became a member of the prestigious centro studi, the cenacle presided over by Ernesto N. Rogers, comprising, besides Rossi, such luminaries as Vittorio Gregotti, Guido Canella and Giorgio Grassi, all of whom contributed to the critical discourse of the postwar Italian magazine Casabella-continuità as edited by Rogers in the late1950s and early-1960s. Rossi’s seminal essay on Adolf Loos which appeared in the November issue of the magazine in 1959 seems to have shaped his own artistic personality as we may judge from a villa, dating from 1960, that he designed and realised with Leonardo Ferrari on the coast of Tuscany in Versilia. This house featured the characteristic pierced windows and split levels to be found in Loos’s Raumplan. As Lopes shows in the third part of his study entitled