PhD Architecture Work in Progress 2012
Since commencing our PhD in 2009, three of the design-based researcher’s at Architecture, Dundee, have presented a modest Work in Progress, free-style exhibition. A grab from the Dundee website reads, “PhD research at Architecture, Dundee is pursued through design and focused around two interrelated themes that support priorities in creative practice and sustainability: Architecture and Intellectual Culture; and Architecture and the Environment.”
I presented study drawings of Fagnano Olona Elementary School, Italy by Aldo Rossi and used the analysis to speculate about Rossi’s analogical praxis in the Aldo Rossi in his Study montage and accompanying sketch studies. These examine the relationship between observation, memory and imagination within an analogical framework and depict the type-forms, type-elements, monuments and anonymous architecture which are at the foundation of Rossi’s praxis.
Fagnano Olona Elementary School is defined by its courtyard plan-form and axially-arranged accommodation. Within the courtyard, wide steps lead to the double height gymnasium, from which one can look toward the cylindrical library with its glazed roof. We can read this analogically and equate the gymnasium with fitness and physical health; opposite the library which is for knowledge; between these are the square and steps which is where the life of a city unfolds. The school is thus a city in microcosm.
The city is where Aldo Rossi’s thesis begins. He developed a theory of types in The Architecture of the City, which was a theory for the building forms that repeated and endured most in the history of architecture and the city. Out of this evolved his concept of the Analogical City, a conceptual framework for transposing collective types and individual monuments from architectural history to be repositioned alongside the most anonymous elements of the city. Mixed, like Canaletto’s vedute and Freud’s composite dream-image.