Analogical Images: Aldo Rossi's Scientific Autobiography

The chapter investigates the combination of two implicit visual worlds entwined in Aldo Rossi’s Autobiografia Scientifica, A Scientific Autobiography (1981): the Enlightenment tradition, and the Christian. The title recalls both Max Planck’s Scientific Autobiography (1956) and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy (1472). The ‘Scientific’ tradition orients the way imagery underlying architectural thinking may be ordered through observable categorisation. The ‘Christian’ world carries a specific modality of image-based language, using the sensuality of visible bodies to visualise the interior human condition. Typology is the specific device adopted to carry the dream of a logical and verifiable practice into architecture, against the solely self-referential or technical authority of the discipline. This chapter explores how Rossi combines these, introducing the scientific and metaphysical device of analogy to underpin the supporting tales of his projects, to generate a new ratio between individuality and community, the predictable and the unpredictable. A metamorphic circularity results in an innovative architectural treatise for improving the civilisation of the city. The use Rossi makes of imagery in the text demonstrates his awareness that designing - encompassing thinking, drawing, loving - is essentially an exchange of images – traversing chronology, memory and dream.