The Analogous City, the Map

A Subtraction of Weight

Dario Rodighiero

The Analogous City is not simply a work that projects over a flat surface a continuous past; rather, it exists as a dialogue with the present and a comparison with one’s ideals and memory. I like to think of The Analogous City as a real alternative. That is how I became an inhabitant of this city and started to patiently reconstruct its history, from its neighborhoods to its streets, from its monuments to its houses. I have talked to the people who lived in this city and listened to the stories of authors, scholars of architecture and simple flâneurs.

I was inspired by Bernardo Secchi (2000), who identifies city planning as a combination of tracks: real practices that model the city, and shape it over time, at their overlapping. Secchi also states that there is another layer that intertwines with the practices and integrates the fragments left by them: the layer of discussions. After months of researching this work, if asked to reflect about it, I would say that The Analogous City is an urban fabric formed by tracks and conversations: tracks of all real and unreal objects that have become a sign on the map; discussions of all those authors, critics, historians, architects, who are equally inhabitants of this city.

This idea already existed, it takes shape in a building designed by Aldo Rossi himself, the Bonnefanten Museum. What better way to show the richness of this urban fabric to visitors – the new inhabitants of this city – than through a city map? An object so simple and recognizable that it does not require any instructions.

Although technologies have transformed the medium over the last few decades, a map preserves its role as an orientation tool that helps to identify an area’s landmarks and to become familiar with them. With a map in hand, one can set out and venture the streets, visit the neighborhoods, marvel at the unexpected sights that only a city can offer, and rediscover the pleasures of wandering, only to find, all of a sudden, one has arrived at destination.

This map has been developed as a tool to know The Analogous City. It is part of a museum installation within the exhibition Aldo Rossi – The Window of the Poet, Prints 1973–1997 (Celant and Huijts 2015) that will be opened in Maastricht next June.¹ This work originates from a cooperation between the Bonnefanten Museum and the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), represented namely by the Archizoom Gallery and the Laboratory of Digital Humanities.

The map consists of a simple sheet that is printed on both sides. One part shows a large format print of the work, with its references listed in chronological order; the other, the texts of Fabio Reinhart and Aldo Rossi, together with the list of references and related images, are shown in their entirety, just as they are printed in books.

Each process of establishing a historical identity requires a certain time and so far the fragments of The Analogous City had never been completely revealed. During this practice of reconstruction and deconstruction of the city, some important and hidden stories have surfaced again, those of its inhabitants: the people who have shaped the city and discussed it by exposing their ideas and stories. All of their stories are so interesting that it is a pity that they cannot all figure there, and that there has not been time to listen to all of them.

The references of The Analogous City have been extracted from existing books; a significant part of the archaeological work has been done in both traditional and digital libraries and archives. By identifying myself with the architects of the city, I have tried to recover all publications that the authors selected, photocopied, cut out and put carefully together in creating this collective collage, now kept in the basements of the Centre Pompidou in Paris (Figure 1).

For this reason, all bibliographic references already existed as publications in the Spring of 1976, when The Analogous City was composed. Any references from a subsequent date are ascribable to the private archives of the authors.

I can truly find myself in the words of Aldo Rossi, who said that this latest project is particularly dear to me; it is an affection project.

I better understood the esteem among architects (not all) for Rossi’s thinking by talking to those who contributed to the work, as well as the effort of the authors who spent whole nights building the city, because as Fabio Reinhart recalls, during the day they had to work to make a living.

Aldo Rossi, Eraldo Consolascio, Bruno Reichlin and Fabio Reinhart worked for months at composing this work and, similarly, it took me some time to decipher it, find the images, digitize book pages, and sometimes my curiosity led me to read the texts in them, which gave the urban fabric color and depth.

In this way, this installation reveals itself as a modern tool, available to all of us, for pursuing our personal growth, and the time spent using this tool generates our affection towards it.

The work has required time and passion. Initially, references arrived quickly, but little by little as the puzzle was being completed, to recover a certain reference became increasingly difficult and took more and more time. For instance, the last reference was found thanks to the help of Beatrice Lampariello, and required months of research, in the spare moments that I had during my doctorate study at EPFL. Reconstructing the tracks required such a long time, in scattered moments, that even now I could not tell exactly how many tracks make up The Analogous City. I count 42.

The map is part of a digital installation within the exhibition. The installation consists of a table, on top of which The Analogous City has been reproduced and from which, with the use of augmented reality technology, it has been possible to extrude all references that compose it, so as to make them interactive: by framing the map with a tablet, the camera framing is displayed on the screen, enriched with virtual references. These elements are the signs that form The Analogous City. Superimposed upon the references of the plan, they fluctuate and invite the viewer to discover and explore the collage of The Analogous City, by means of a deconstruction (Figure 2).

As a publication, the map offers a similar experience as the installation exhibited at the museum: by downloading the application, it is possible to interact with the map, which replicates at home what visitors have experienced at the museum.

As Italo Calvino (1988) would say, my work has involved the subtraction of weight: the references of The Analogous City were freed, disconnected from the work and made to fluctuate. This operation has revealed new relations between references, thereby creating new meanings: new conversations that have their foundations in the tracks of the city, which reminds us that The Analogous City is not a static work, but rather a lively, dynamic city.

Finally the work loses the typical vertical orientation of a painting, to become a city map and meeting place for the museum installation. The intention has been to generate a new space that is also a meeting point, like a square, and then to enrich that place with personal discussions, stories, and people, because we should not forget that, as Rossi (1981) reminded in his A Scientific Autobiography, “the project was only a pretext for a general involvement”.

References

• Calvino, Italo. 1988. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Celant, Germano, and Stijn Huijts, eds. 2015. Aldo Rossi: Opera Grafica: Etchings Lithographs Silkscreen Prints. Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana Editoriale.
• Rossi, Aldo. 1981. A Scientific Autobiography. Translated by Lawrence Venuti. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Secchi, Bernardo. 2000. Prima lezione di urbanistica. Roma-Bari: Laterza.

Captions for The Analogous City

Fabio Reinhart. Translated by Christopher Stead.

Hereafter, some notes to guide visitors. Words and diagrams reveal the authors’ principal compositional choices.

Cities materialize the multiple, disparate and changing lives of generations of inhabitants, as individuals and in groups; from whom they accept requirements, desires, acquaintances… dreams, fears, hopes and still more yet: everything, to cut it short. More so, they mark the changes imposed by the vagaries of fate, capable of exaltation or annihilation, through the irresponsible slightness of indifference. Complexity is naturally co-substantive of the city.

This, its first distinctive characteristic of undefinable magnitude, is immediately evident from its heterogeneous, multiple and contradictory togetherness: heterogeneous its representation, form and scale dimensions; multiple its contours, orientations, centers, symmetries and vanishing points; contradictory and conflictual its ordering principles.

The first apparition is theatrical and baroque. A mysterious figure – Angel? Youth? Beauty? Messenger, in the mind of the authors – greets and solicits in singular manner the gaze of every visitor directly indicating, with a peremptory gesture of fore-arm and finger, the center of the composition amidst racks, pinions, gears, pins and the flywheels of an unstoppable machine.

Gestalt principles of form psychology ought to cater for the perception of its perpetual movement. The authors counted on that. They also confided that it induced a sensation of sorts in Jean Tinguely connoisseurs, such that they even felt it screech, pant, puff, and groan.

The picture panel has a spatial layout.

In the vertical plane (xz) is shown the plan layout with partial view of the city landscape. Implicit is the dark, unknown, outer space beyond that from which the messenger emerges. In front is figured whatever “came before” the city: the lie of the land and mankind, a blend of reason and sentiment.

From the horizontal plane (xy), corresponding to expanses of water, emerges the shaping of dry lands. Implicit below, by reference to the submerged city, sinks the space of geological times and of forgotten or lost history.

Rising up front, the foreground, canonical element of the landscape view, distends itself.

This composes with the rationality of regular solids, needed to govern space and order architecture in complicity with reason and sentiment; finally with objects of affection as tabernacles of sentiment.

The landscape view as the first, immediate, image of ‘city’ in relation to ‘territory’.

One reaches the Analogous City across the water, as if “by sea”, from wherever. One enters it through the new city-gate… an example of analogy and key to interpreting the picture panel.

Directly into the plan layout is introduced a second point of access.

It is concealed and secret, as was then our very lively hope of executing the restoration project for Castelgrande in Bellinzona (A). An aerial trellis beam leading along the stratification of defensive battlements, and an aerial spiral stair suspended over the remains of the corner tower, would have reinstated the walkways and the tower without recourse to reconstruction techniques; would have pitted provisional human endeavor and precarious manufacture against longer periods of history, against the permanence of deep-rooted historical demands; would have fused, into one, the emotional experiences induced by vertiginous distances, both spatial and temporal.

Trellis beam and spiral stair would have been an excellent opportunity for a visitor desirous to grasp the spirit of the city they are about to visit, to understand how the city can be transformed yet at the same time retain its own character unaltered, conserve its memory of self.

After the manner employed by Magritte in his 1965 “Le Blanc-seing”, the plan layout brings together three parts which superpose and abut each other: the real city (B), the city of memory (C), the ideal city (D).

Miming reality, various local interventions on the layout were entrusted to the responsibility of each author. Superimposed over the real city, in a domestic space evoked by two lines and a ceiling lamp, a spectator inhabitant – “Aldo Rossi, poet” according to Ton Quik – examines from the window an abyssal glimpse of history deep into the mythological heart of the western city.

From Picture Panel to City-Map

Fabio Reinhart. Translated by Christopher Stead.

The “Analogous city” lives on by means of analogous mutation; more precisely, through those mutations related to analogy, memory and identity.

The picture panel focuses on this highly diffuse yet intrinsically marvelous phenomenon by combining both pictorial views and cartographic representations.

Every form of life—biological or cultural—manifests this phenomenon to such an extent that it is often identified with the vital process, or indeed with life itself. Everyone embodies and is intimately aware of this: to live on is to undergo transformation, yet remain the same, and preserve the memory of oneself.

A further example stands before your eyes now, timely inasmuch as it shows two separate, revealing moments in any transformation: one before and one after, the form at the beginning and at the end.

Although present in the picture panel merely as a watermark, the separation distinguishes elements confined to memory: in line with architecture’s self-referential nature, the “Analogous city” is built up through the sedimentary over-laying of many cities which, together and by design, reconstitutes its social and cultural genealogy.

What you have to hand now is no “Analogous city”, nor even a more or less faithful and accurate representation of it, but a “Map of the Analogous city” or rather of the same reality, posited in an analogous form.

The content-identity of picture panel and city-map – both refer to the same reality – allows us to grasp the specificities and the implications of such analogous mutations.

The map is an interpretation of the picture panel, a sort of re-invention within the framework of a new social and cultural reality: of identical content, but materially and dimensionally mutant.

Briefly, regarding this issue, just two observations:

The two-by-two meter format of the original picture panel responds to contingencies, the exhibition event, and the space in which it was to be hung.

The dimensional factor alone involves aspects of disparity. Requiring vertical display, it determines viewers’ standing positions, postures and movements; even conditioning perception, hence too the potential to understand.

For example, the viewer’s eye-level coincides with the horizontal datum spanning the center, the floor beneath the viewer’s feet corresponds to the pictorial plane over which four figures below the Pleiades move forward. Spatial conditions help the spectator recognize his or her own positioning in relation to the work.

The picture panel was devised for a public attending the International Architecture Exhibition of the 1976 Venice Biennale. Today it stands witness to those faculties that the authors considered legitimate to ascribe to a public, typically educated, accustomed to recognizing figurative conventions through historical and artistic elements rooted in time and space, even if distant.

These days the picture-cum-map is a more versatile tool, fitting the pocket.

A common every-day object as such, supplied with information usually useful to the visitor and probably indispensable to latter generations, once more it is proposed as a cartographic representation of territory, to whomsoever must bridge a cultural gap widened in forty years.

Analogies superposed produce a sort of kaleidoscopic play of mirrors. The mutation endured by the picture panel is analogous to that represented: ongoing renewal transfigures a city which remains its same self; expressed differently, ‘city-map’ stands in relation to ‘picture panel’ as “Analogous city” stands to ‘city’.

Remains identical the nature of its content. However, picture panel, city-map and Aldo Rossi’s text (reproduced on the right) state the poetics upheld by their authors.

In this statement are posited the basis, direction and meaning of their design work and teaching.

Indeed, subjection to critically evaluated guidelines alone can rid work of servility, make responsible purveyors shine out, and allow the artist to aspire to fullness of expression.

If – as is observed – verbal conventions have greater permanence than figurative ones, Aldo Rossi’s text thrives on this condition, remaining fresh and legible: it therefore has no need of revision, nor of notes.

However, to its acuteness is merit only due, since the diagnosis and the remedies expressed maintain their relevance, forty years of very bad territorial management having under-lined the urgency.

Text and images of the “Analogous city” are complementary, and constitute a whole.

Words relate facts and thoughts, images call them up (or recall them) instantly, contributing to their remembrance, as will know whoever lives cities and monuments enquiringly.

Without them – quite probably – you would not be reading the accompanying text and, in consequence, would not occur to you as much as I would hope for: that you ask yourself what is, will be, or could be, your own poetics. Were you to do so, you would discover one of their further properties: images can set alight curiosity, which illuminates knowledge and even, at times, the principal path of one’s own life, not merely professional.