Rossi and Elemental Forms

Aldo Rossi

L.S. Lowry

Ornament is Crime

Simple forms speak clearly of their function and civic presence.

The vertical extrusion, the barrel vault, the pyramidal roof.

There is a distillitation of form without ornamentation which allows the architecture to speak clearly, contextually, and without superfluous noise.

Lowry's Lancashire was filled with such forms, a necessity of the Capitalistic enthusiasm for maximum profit, buildings were built as practical structures.

Industrial architecture has always sought this through functionalism; in a peculiar way this is a return to the principles of Gothic as espoused by Pugin:

 "...there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction, or propriety" and "all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building"

Rossi is not a Functionalist

'Places are stronger than people' said Rossi, and when concerning the city, this is the principal by which his architecture operates.

Aldo Rossi understands architecture and urban planning as the materialisation of memory; the way in which individuals move through their temporal path through space is memorialised in the physical. In a sense, a pavement such as St. Mark's Square is a secondary relic; a touch relic which has within it the presence of the events which happen upon it. The surrounding buildings too are relics too in their relation to the cultural narrative of the city.

This relic of space can be described as Patrimony.

Rossi sought to identify typologies which relate to this patrimony of space and it is from here that the forms of his architecture originate.