Skrevet af LOPEZ
Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931–97) is a crucial figure in
twentieth-century architecture, his work highly influential in both
theory and practice. Working in Italy and throughout Europe after World
War II, he disputed the then-dominant credos of the modernists—and even
went so far as to question the very status of his profession. Discarding
utopian pretenses, his work claimed the autonomy of architecture with
formal restraint.
In Melancholy and Architecture, Diogo
Seixas Lopes looks at Rossi’s work through the lens of a term often
used to describe Rossi’s work: melancholy. While the influence of
melancholy on literature and the visual arts has been extensively
studied, its presence in architecture has been largely overlooked.
Exploring Rossi’s entire career, Lopes traces out the oscillation
between enthusiasm and disenchantment that marks Rossi’s work. Through a
close exploration of one of Rossi’s landmark works, the Cemetery of San
Cataldo in Modena, he shows how this brilliant, innovative architect
reinterpreted a typology of the past to help us come to terms with
representations of death and the deep sadness that inevitably
accompanies it.
Beautifully illustrated, Melancholy and Architecture both illuminates the career of a key postwar architect and offers a new perspective on the long cultural history of melancholy.
