Theatrum vel Monumentum: The Permanence of Ephemeral in the Work of Aldo Rossi

Abstract

At the base of the poetics of Aldo Rossi those who Manfredo Tafuri called the "unspeakable extremes", life and death, in the architectural form of the theatre and the monument are counterposed. Although Rossi has often joined them, for a long time the criticism of his work has been disinterested taking the apparent aporia between ephemeral and definitive, only with the purpose to recompose them in unities ending up in simplifying a complex reasoning that had mainly to do with a rituality of the architectural element and building contrasting sides between those who believe that the primacy of Rossi’s architecture is held by the monument and who by the theatre. This way, far from the theoretical-formal expectations of Rossi, impoverishes the didactic legacy of a master who recognized in the coincidental oppositorum the classical harmony and aknowledged the ephemeral as an essential teaching foundation for the theory of architecture and for the sensitivity necessary to build. The project of the Teatrino Scientifico, a device to see the Architecture but also a portable monument, and the Opera scenographies of the mid-1980s state it. Undoubtedly " monuments are fixed points in the urban dynamic" (Rossi, 1966) and in them the city assumes the exemplary architectural form, but this dynamic is generated by the existence of the theatrical - and therefore ephemeral - element of the human life. Not by chance Rossi, since his graduation thesis and throughout his whole career, drew theatrical spaces not only as places for the Muses, but devices for the performance of the city (where the Architecture is the actor) or scenic architectures (where the theatre hosts real or ephemeral parts of the city into itself) as a will to reunite in a practice the unreconciled (Nicht Versöhnt – the unreconciled, indeed – was the tragedy, by a Heinrich Böll's novel represented in the Teatro del Mondo in Venice, 1980); on the one hand the hard crust of the monumental element, on the other hand the ephemeral nature of the theatrical play. Like history and memory, body and soul, immortality and succession.