4.0: Aldo Rossi and Typology

In Module 4 “Aldo Rossi and Typology,“ our final module in Part I: Form and History, you are given one more example of the architectural imagination at work. The modern Italian architect Aldo Rossi, perhaps, shares Hegel’s understanding that architecture is one of the fundamental human postulates of our existence in the world. For Rossi, too, architecture is a central medium of human thought and human memory. However, in Rossi’s work, we find the suggestion that architecture’s origin is not simply behind us, as Hegel insisted, but that architecture is constantly finding its origin again and again, and that this beginning must constantly be reimagined. The imagination uses historical precedents to create new architectural projects. You will return to the idea of typology, which was briefly introduced with the example of Palladio’s villas in Lecture 1.3. You will examine Rossi’s particular understanding of this concept of type through two of his projects: the Cemetery at Mod