The Three States of the Architectural Fragment as a Collective Archive of Concepts: Tracing an Alternative Genealogy of Aldo Rossi’s Analogous Cities

Abstract

This article scrutinizes the persistent preoccupation with fragments in the work of Italian architect Aldo Rossi. Two heretofore overlooked volumes of his Quaderni Azzurri (blue notebooks) from the special collections of the Getty Research Institute are deployed as a point of departure in order to unpack the analogies Rossi draws between archaeology and conceptualization in architecture. His observations on three approaches to restoration, which correspond to Olympia and the two radically diverse Minoan Palaces of Knossos and Phaistos in Greece, are analyzed as three distinct states of the architectural fragment. The states are paralleled with interconnected projects that Rossi developed sequentially over the course of a decade—namely, the two iterations of La città analoga (The analogous city) exhibited at the Milan Triennale (1972) and the Venice Biennale (1976) as well as a contribution to the exhibition Roma interrotta (1978)—to delineate an architectural genealogy informed by a collective archive of concepts.