Positivism, Doubt, Resignation - Aldo Rossi and the Poetics of Paralysis (original) (raw)

2018, Positivism, Doubt, Resignation - Aldo Rossi and the Poetics of Paralysis

" But for the old master builders the drawing was merely a means of communicating with craftsmen who carried out the work. Just as a poet has to communicate through writing. However, we are not so totally devoid of culture as to get a boy to take up poetry just because he has a calligraphic hand " i " The second half of the nineteenth century was filled with the sound of false prophets, men without culture, crying, " We have no architectural style! " How wrong, how incorrect. That was the very time that had a more distinct style, one that differed more distinctly from the preceding period, a change unparalleled in cultural history. Since, however, these false prophets could only recognize a product by the varying ornamentation, this ornamentation became a fetish for them and they substituted it for the real thing, calling it " style ". Style we already had, but no ornamentation. If I were to chip off all the ornamentation from our old and new buildings, leaving only the bare walls, I would certainly find it difficult to distinguish fifteenth –century from seventeenth-century buildings. But even the man in the street would recognise those of the nineteenth century at a glance. We had no ornamentation and they moaned that we had no style. So they kept on copying ornaments from the past until they found it ridiculous, so when they had gone as far as they could go in that direction, they started inventing new ornaments. That is they sunk to such a low cultural level that they were able to do that. And now they congratulate themselves on having created the style of the twentieth century. But that is not the style of the twentieth century. There are many objects which show the style of the twentieth century in its pure form, and these are the objects produced by craftsmen who were not working under the tutelage of one of the warped graduates of the schools. First and foremost they are the tailors, they are the shoemakers, the makers of bags and saddles, carriages and instruments and all those who avoided the fate of being uprooted from culture because their craft seemed too ordinary to the false prophets to be worth reforming. What good fortune! From such scraps as architects left me I was able, twelve years ago, to reconstruct modern joinery work, the joinery we would have if architects had never stuck their noses in a joiner's workshop. I did not approach the task like an artist, giving free rein to his creative imagination (as they doubtless put it in artistic circles). No. I went to the workshops, as a timid as an apprentice, looked up respectively to the man in the blue apron and, and asked him to share his secrets with me. For many a piece of workshop tradition still lay there, bashfully hidden from the eyes of the architects. And when they realised what I wanted, when they saw I was not one of those who would deface their beloved wood with his drawing-board fantasies, when they saw I had no intention of defiling the noble colour of their revered material with green or violet stains, they glowed with craftsman's pride, revealed their carefully concealed tradition and gave vent to their hatred of their oppressors. I found modern panelling in the cladding of the old lavatory water tanks, I found a modern solution for the problem of corners in the chests for silver cutlery, I found locks and metal fittings on suitcases and pianos. And I found out the most important thing, namely that the style of 1900 differs from that of 1800 to the same extent as the tail coat of 1900 differs from that of 1800. "