Metal Circus: Abstraction and Method in Aldo Rossi’s Early Work

The essay focuses on the early work of Aldo Rossi, for the most part produced in collaboration with Gianugo Polesello, Luca Meda and Giorgio Grassi. In the early 1960s Rossi attempted to define a design method in which the juxtaposition of a limited set of simple architectural pieces was parallel by the theory of typology as a way to read architecture beyond individual authorship. Such commitment to abstraction was lost in Rossi’s subsequent work in the 1970s and 1980s. The main argument of the essay us that in Rossi’s early work the goal was not the creation of an architectural style through the production of evocative architectural images but the elaboration of a transmissible and sharable design method defined by both the radical abstraction of architecture and the possibility to turn this abstraction into a monumental form.