Product Description

Postscript by Vincent Scully

Based on notebooks composed since 1971, Aldo Rossi's memoir intermingles his architectural projects, including discussion of the major literary and artistic influences on his work, with his personal history. His ruminations range from his obsession with theater to his concept of architecture as ritual. The illustrations-photographs, evocative images, as well as a set of drawings of Rossi's major architectural projects prepared particularly for this publicationwere personally selected by the author to augment the text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1214801 in Books
• Published on: 1984-04-26
• Original language: Italian
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 125 pages

Review
"As nostalgia has swept the architectural community in recent years, one of the most Proustian design sensibilities to emerge has been that of Italian architect Aldo Rossi. The enfant terrible of Italy's 1960s Tendenza group, which fulminated against the modern movement, Rossi published influential polemics and kept an equally eloquent personal record in the form of notebooks, which MIT has published as the handsome A Scientific Autobiography.... His own reminiscences—convents and castles, the emotional pull of holy statuary, Melville's dramatics, an adolescent's fear of death, a young artist's ways with life—fill his lyrical, erudite notebooks."
—Portfolio

Language Notes
Text: English, Italian (translation)

Customer Reviews

an unappreciated masterpiece
This is my second favorite book of all time on the subject of architecture. The over appreciated invisible cities, by Italo Calvino, still holds at number one. But this book is sadly left behind. Difficult and dense, it is nonetheless one of the most profound and poignant reflections on architecture and man's place in the world. Rossi shows us just how intimately architecture is connected to man's search for happiness, and how it participates in our mortality, our will to live. Read this and love the human project just a little bit more.