Almost fifty years after the first edition of the Architecture of the City (Architettura della città) in Italy, this seminal work by the architect Aldo Rossi (1931–1997) was published in Russian. It is supplemented by the "Scientific Autobiography", first published in 1990, and in Russian translation provided with a foreword by Rossi's daughter, the president of the foundation named after him.
“Architecture of the city” gives the author's view of the history of world urban planning, considering the city as a set of buildings of different times, and architecture - not as a design of urban space, but as a “structure”, or, more simply, a building. The book interprets the city in its temporal development as a special phenomenon of the interaction of various social, economic, legislative and political factors. The discourse unfolds around the concept of fatti urbani, which in Russian translation has become “facts of the urban environment”. In Rossi's approach, one can see the influence of Marxism, the American school of social ecology, semiotics and other new humanities, which flourished in the post-war years. This work became one of the first voices in the controversy with modernist urban planning for a return to the traditional city structure with streets and squares.
“Architecture of the City” is a textbook text of the theory of architecture of the twentieth century, written by one of the ideologists of postmodernism and the return to the “traditional” understanding of architecture, Aldo Rossi. His buildings such as the cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena (1971–78) and the Theater of Peace for the 1980 Venice Biennale have long been included in the pantheon of images of modern architecture and are noted in all its “stories”. Since the publication of Architecture of the City in 1966, this book has been translated into many languages and included in textbooks on the history of architecture and urban planning. In 2011, for the 45th anniversary of its first edition, the famous IUAV - Institute of Architecture and Urban Planning of the University of Venice - held a special conference and exhibition. A Russian translation of her fragment, made by art critic Olga Nazarova, appeared at the same time, in 2011, on the pages of the PROJECT international magazine on the initiative of Anna Bronovitskaya and professor at the Milan Polytechnic Alessandro De Magistris, with the latter's commentary.
The 2015 translation is not accompanied by a commentary, but is provided with all the author's prefaces from the first American edition, so that the modern domestic reader is explained in detail the circumstances of the publication of the text in the United States in the early 1980s, while the reasons for its appearance today in the publishing house of a prestigious institute "Strelka" the reader must reflect on his own.
In the past two decades, many translations of the most important works on the theory of art and architecture have been published in Russia. These are “Seven Lights of Architecture” and “Stones of Venice” by John Ruskin, “Renaissance and Baroque” by Heinrich Wölflin, “Renaissance and“Renaissance”in Western Art” by Erwin Panofsky and many other iconic works. All of them were provided with commentaries and prefaces by modern specialists, helping to understand the value of the text that has already become historical. The Architecture of the City, written just six years after the Renaissance and Renaissance, is quite consistent with the format of these works, which not only influenced art history and architecture studies, but also changed the very perception of artistic and architectural heritage.
It is surprising why Rossi's book, a “monument” to architectural theory, did not appear in Russian much earlier. During the Soviet era, many fundamental texts by foreign architects of the twentieth century, from Le Corbusier to Charles Jencks, were translated, and many books were published in Russian soon after their first publication, such as Pierre Luigi Nervi's Build Correctly (original edition - 1955, Soviet edition - 1957).
At the time of the first publication of "Architecture of the City", and throughout the entire 2nd half of the twentieth century, cultural ties with Italy were strong, Italian engineers worked in the USSR, Italian factories were built, including FIAT-VAZ, Soviet architects exhibited at the Milan Triennial (1968), exhibitions of Renato Guttuso and Giacomo Manzu were held in Moscow, and Italian films were shown in cinemas - from masterpieces of neorealism to light comedies with actors beloved by the Soviet public. Aldo Rossi himself, like many of his colleagues of those years, had a genuine interest in the Soviet Union. He even visited Moscow in 1954 with a group of young communists as a spokesman for Casabella-Continuità magazine (then headed by Ernesto Nathan Rogers, one of the architects of the BBPR group, author of the famous slogan "From spoon to city"). Upon returning home, young Rossi wrote an enthusiastic essay for Casabella about Stalin's skyscrapers, which, of course, no one published, but not at all because of his dislike of the USSR, as one might think, but on the contrary. The avant-garde Italian architectural magazines, even in the days of fascism, sharply criticized Stalinist historicism. In the post-war period, when communism seemed to be the only alternative to fascism, and the architecture of modernism was the only hope for long-awaited social justice, the leading magazine could not illustrate an article about the Soviet Union - "earthly paradise" - with photographs of such eclectic "monsters". Thus, Rossi already then turned out to be a "black sheep" among his compatriots contemporaries - Manfredo Tafuri, Vittorio Gregotti, Vittorio De Feo, Carlo Aimonino, Giancarlo Di Carlo, who studied, analyzed and published the legacy of Soviet constructivism, the experiments of the NER group and other urban planners and the architects of post-war modernism. Rossi retained sympathy for the “Stalinist” legacy for the rest of his life: he did not speak openly about them, but sometimes he shared them with his colleagues.
The popularity of "Architecture of the City" abroad far surpasses the works of Rossi's Italian colleagues, who in one way or another developed the topics discussed in his book. Gregotti wrote about the need to consider the territory as a single project, Tafuri talked about architecture in the capitalist system, and "naive functionalism" was criticized almost in chorus by the entire Roman school from Moretti to the young Portogesi, including the modernist Mario Fiorentino, the author of the famous residential complex Corviale, who he assured that his design was not inspired by Le Corbusier's "residential unit", but by the combination of housing and the service sector in one building, characteristic of historical Rome.
Aldo Rossi belonged to a specific generation, "suspended" between the generation of architects who worked "for the regime" and the next - the revolutionary-minded "generation '68" (director and poet Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote about its participants: "You have the faces of daddy's sons. I hate you as well as your fathers”(“Italian Communist Party - to the Young”, 1968, translation of the quote mine), to which most of today's Italian architectural masters belong.
Rossi and his contemporaries had to develop and rehabilitate many themes raised during the rapid development of cities under fascism, among which was the theme of the historical city. The concepts of "environment", careful reconstruction and urban planning analysis of historical buildings were developed in Italy within the controversy about urban reconstruction, which was actively engaged in the fascist regime; among the protagonists of those interwar years were also avant-garde architects, such as Giuseppe Terragni with the project of reconstruction of Como and Luggi Piccinato with the urban planning study of Rome. After the war, the theme of the historic city was opened from a new angle: the architects faced the problem of restoring the destroyed Naples, Padua, Frascati … These and many other Italian art centers were badly damaged by the bombing, and in some of them you can still find vacant lots and collapsed walls, such as, for example, in Palermo. Actually, all Milanese architects of the second half of the twentieth century were formed as masters in the reconstruction of their city, destroyed in 1943, as Chino Dzucchi perfectly showed at the last Venice Biennale. Rossi grew up in this atmosphere (as he recalls in The Architecture of the City), and his work inherited the difficult and poignant intellectual climate of Italy during the economic boom.
“Architecture of the City” came out in the same year with the work of Robert Venturi “Complexity and Contradictions in Architecture” and had many common themes with it. Its English-language edition appeared in the United States in 1982, in the heyday of postmodern architecture, and became an important milestone in the growth of Russia's international fame. The following year, he was appointed by Paolo Portogesi to curate the architectural section of the Venice Biennale, and in 1990 he became the first Italian Pritzker Prize winner.
The publication of "Architecture of the City" in Russian comes at a time of growing interest in post-war modernism, on the one hand, and on the other, during discussions about the regeneration of the urban environment and neighborhood development, when new residential areas imitating old Italian cities are receiving rave reviews and rising a wave of uncritical interest in the "Stalinist legacy".
It is hoped that the book will not be perceived as a "fresh" word in the criticism of functionalism, if only because both Rossi and the functionalism criticized by him have long been on the shelves of history, and the degree of their relevance is increasingly approaching the relevance of the works of Palladio and Vitruvius …
Separately, I would like to note the work of the translator Anastasia Golubtsova, who had to work with an incredibly complex text - already because many of the terms that are natural for the Italian urban planning discourse do not exist in Russian. For example, the key concept of the book - fatti urbani, which in the English version turned into urban artefacts, became in the Russian edition “facts of the urban environment”. Although the Russian equivalent - "fact" and does not convey the semantics of the Italian concept of fatto (a verbal noun from fare - to do), it is close enough to the idea that Rossi put into this phrase. Perhaps, however, the translation did not always have to be true to Rossi's phraseology. For example, the ambiguity of the meaning of the phrase “an individual element of an architectural fact” (p. 40), with which “architectural types” interact, could be avoided if the translation sought not to formally close the terminology adopted in the book, but to ensure that convey its meaning, for example - "the individual character of the structure / building."
Also controversial seems to be the translation of urbanistica by the term "urbanism", which in Russian means rather the administration of the city than directly "town planning" associated primarily with the work of an architect. And precisely in view of the lexical specifics of Rossi's work and the high semantic capacity of his terms, I would like to see a commentary on the "difficulties of translation" - regarding the terminology used in it, which, alas, does not exist.
The Scientific Autobiography supplements the publication of City Architecture. Rossi borrowed the name from the "Scientific Autobiography" by Max Planck (1946), a German physicist and philosopher, whose name bears the largest association of scientific institutes in Germany. In this book, the architect describes his creative path, his view of architecture, illustrating it with numerous historical parallels, and also reveals his own statement: “Architecture is one of the ways of survival found by mankind; it is a way to express your inescapable pursuit of happiness."
Strelka Press attributed the lack of modern scholarly commentary to both books to the wishes of the heirs. The significance of these texts for modern architecture, as well as the abundance of names in them, many of which are not as familiar to the reader today as 50 years ago (for example, Pierre Lavedant and Marcel Poet - one of the founders of the "history of the city"), make the absence of such a comment quite tangible. We can only guess how the introduction of a competent researcher explaining the circumstances of the book's appearance, its importance for the publishing house of the Strelka Institute, for Russian-speaking architects, historians, architecture critics and for modern Russian readers in general, could damage these significant works of architectural thought.
It is hoped that the publication will become the reason for the appearance of such a scientific analysis of these works in Russian, in the context of modern Russian urban planning problems.
The author of the article is an architectural historian, PhD in art history, lecturer in the history of architecture of the twentieth century at the University of Rome Tor Vergata.
Rossi A.
City architecture / Per. with it. Anastasia Golubtsova
M.: Strelka Press, 2015 - 264 p.
ISBN 978-5-906264-21-3
Rossi A.
Scientific autobiography / Per. with it. Anastasia Golubtsova
M.: Strelka Press, 2015 - 176 p.
ISBN 978-5-906264-20-6
