Militant Bourgeois

Go read: the FJ on the paintings and architecture of Aldo Rossi: Communist, surrealist draughtsman and alleged proto-postmodernist. Entirely coincidentally, I've just read Rossi's The Architecture of the City for the first time, and fascinating as it is, I can confess to sharing the usual feeling of puzzlement upon facing Rossi's theoretical works for the first time. Much of the book is made up of precise definitions of terms, but it seems absolutely riven with puzzles and contradictions which are initially hidden by the austere rationalism of the prose, and which then linger, nagging, in the mind. It's difficult, first of all, to read this as the definitive critique of the Modern Movement that it was taken as in the '70s. There's some disdain for 'naive functionalism' and the rolling thunder version of urban planning, but that was widely discredited by that point anyway - and the city plans of Berlin's Martin Wagner or Le Corbusier are assumed by Rossi in stageist fashion to have been 'necessary', in the same way as was the Haussmannian obliteration of the medieval city. While others in the '70s would look outside Modernism towards the formal abundance of Edwin Lutyens or Raymond Hood, Rossi, like other Italian Marxist architectural theorists, looks towards only those Modernists who pass a test of maximum theoretical and aesthetic severity and consistency - Adolf Loos, and strangest of all for those who would make a postmodernist out of him, the ruthlessly stark, awe-inspiringly joyless city-planning of Ludwig Hilberseimer.

It's tricky to determine exactly how Rossi's Pittura Metafisica aesthetic derives from the theory, except through a certain refusal of technological fetishism and a - not reverence for, but acknowledgment of the past, combined with the quasi-mystical belief in archetypal typologies*. Rossi disdains as 'pathetic' attempts at contextualism, expressly citing the boredom created when areas are designed to be 'in keeping', but the theory all hinges on the locus, the urban focal point, the mixed-use urban centre, the location for the collective memory - the examples range from a palazzo in Padua, Rome's Forum, and (repeatedly) Diocletian's Palace, eventually adapted into the town of Split. This locus, then, is adaptable, grows over time, is mixed use...in fact, it sounds remarkably like the Megastructure, the point in post-war Modernism that was regarded, by Italian Marxists like Rossi and Manfredo Tafuri** as the ultimate Keynesian hubris, the nadir of programmatic, technocratic Modernism. Although just to complicate matters, Rossi cites, seemingly without disapproval, Corbusier's Unite and Sheffield's streets-in-sky schemes, which are arguably the first megastructures. What the locus doesn't seem to entail is the kind of serene yet disturbing structures that Rossi actually designed, which, fascinating as they are, seem, as pointed out above, to be 'a mute backdrop', formally impressive but seemingly deliberately oppressive, flirting ostentatiously with the aesthetics of 'totalitarianism'*** - not only did Rossi's work resemble Italy's then-recent Fascist past, such as EUR, he was also an enthusiast for Stalinist architecture, describing the admittedly gobsmacking Stalinallee as 'Europe's last great street'.

It's quite possible that this was in some sense satire, a deliberate architectural return-of-the-repressed. This would bring him in line with the megastructural satirists he's bracketed with in Pier Vittorio Aureli's intriguing The Project of Autonomy****, only rather than Archizoom or Superstudio's mockery of Archigram's hyper-positivism, Rossi's immanent critique involved exhuming the otherwise forgotten inter-war international style of domineering stripped classicism. A political architecture that proceeds through satire, rather than the democratic futurism aimed at by, say, Cedric Price's Fun Palace, would also fit with Rossi's final claim in Architecture of the City, which he shares with Tafuri, that 'there is no such thing as an oppositional architecture' (cf Tafuri: 'there cannot be founded a class architecture, but only a class critique of architecture'.) Yet, earlier in the book, he divides housing styles into the pre-capitalist house, the capitalist house (for rental - this before the 'property-owning democracy') and the socialist house, with the latter being exemplified by the urban planning of Red Vienna - so the latter is, at least in some sense, surely a class architecture, placed in a city and country which in the 20s and early 30s faced an intense class struggle - in fact, the construction of the likes of Karl-Marx-Hof specifically 'expropriated the expropriators', dispossessing the city's landlords, who then became a bulwark of Austro-Fascism. 

 

That's as maybe. Yet the most curious thing about The Architecture of the City, again something it shares with Tafuri, Franceso Dal Co et al, is just how deliberately bourgeois it is, an exemplar of a situation recently critiqued in Perry Anderson's depressing recent autopsy on Italian Communism, where the Italian Communist Party presented itself as the guardian of what Tafuri called 'the great bourgeois artistic culture' against the Americanist barbarians who would have their final triumph in the utterly terrifying form of Silvio Berlusconi's Italy. This might seem a rather counter-intuitive move for a professedly proletarian party, although it has a certain undeniable logic, more than amply justified by the fact that the PCI's prolonged death gave way to the proud moronism of the 'post-Fascist' Forza Italia/'Freedom People' movement. When you read, and equally importantly, look at the illustrations to The Architecture of the City, you're overwhelmed by the images of a culture that stretches back to antiquity, of layers upon layers of construction and elegance reproduced via grainy lithographs, a weight of culture which could be glorified through Rossi's faintly Jungian idea of 'collective memory' or which could be considered a nightmare from which we're trying to awake. It would be instructive to compare Rossi's collective memory with the collective unconscious that Benjamin borrowed from Jung in the Arcades Project and then formed into something very different. Benjamin's dreaming collective didn't wanly haunt De Chirico colonnades, they frequented the glass and iron shopping malls, the cinemas and the spaces of mass entertainment. In those projects disdained by the Italian critical architectural theorists, most obviously in Cedric Price's work, there was a move to use these technologies of mass entertainment for expressly socialist, participative purposes. This still seems a more worthwhile project than a Communism brought about through becoming more bourgeois than the bourgeoisie.

* ...and doesn't that make him a bit of an ancestor to the 'a house should look like a house' tendency...?

** Not that the relentless negativity of Tafuri and co isn't infinitely preferable to the jolly, vacant positivism that Archigram and its successors ushered in.

*** As a fan of bleak empty plazas this is not necessarily a criticism - although the only Rossi buildings I've seen first hand are in his horrible late 'Quarter' in Berlin. Actually, although Rossi might seem 'unassimilable' today, the urban policy of Hans Stimmann's Berlin seems very heavily influenced by Rossi and his successors like O.M Ungers - the 90s and 00s city is absolutely full of scarily blank Hilberseimer-via-Speer buildings like this - which, if feeling generous, we could say provide a mute backdrop for contemporary Berlin's international hedonism...

**** As reviewed by me in Blueprint a few months ago - no link unfortunately...

Milan image via.