Creative Processes in Rossi’s Collage: Composing and Arranging

Abstract

In the international background of the 1960s and 1970s, Rossi’s architecture, both built and on paper, made an impact for the abstract and enigmatic dimension of its representation. After his early experiments with painting carried out in the 1940s and 1950s, and his development of particular graphic solutions at the beginning of the 1960s, Rossi invented a genre of collage that was not just a technical tool for the representation of buildings and projects in the form of a composition of plan, section, elevation and axonometric projection, nor an instrument for depicting their details or relations with landscapes and cities. Rossi’s collage was markedly artistic in character, able to combine imagination and reality and aimed at raising questions about the very idea of architecture. Collage became for Rossi the preferred tool imbued with a theoretical value, for probing the more recondite and sometimes unexpected meanings of his architecture, and for thoroughly investigating some of his reflections on researches and architectural designs, to the point of acting as the backdrop for the invention, in 1969, of a new poetics, that of the “analogous city”. This paper investigates for the first time, and through drawings, annotations and other archival documents, the forms and contents of Rossi’s collage, its evolution and its pivotal role in the foundation of the “analogous city”, and reveals, precisely through that particular genre of representation, the very essence of Rossi’s architecture.