Page 65 - Studio International - September October 1975

justifications. In a critical article in
Oppositions, Manfredo Tafuri can thus
describe Aldo Rossi's architecture as
`a universe of carefully selected signs,
within which the law of exclusion
dominates, and in fact is the controlling
expression," 3 and the trend it represents
as 'l'Architecture dans le Boudoir'
because the circle drawn around
linguistic experimentation reveals a
pregnant affinity with the obsessively
Sade.14
rigorous writings of the Marquis de
Freed from reality, independent of
ideology, architectural values are striving
towards a purity never reached since the
Russian formalist criticism of the
twenties, when it was argued that the
only valid object of literary criticism was
the literary text. Here, the tautology of
architecture — that is, an architecture that
describes itself — becomes a syntax of
empty signs, often derived from a
selective historicism that concentrates on
moments of history: the early Modern
Movement, but also the Roman
monument, the Renaissance Palace, the
Castle. Transmitted through history,
removed from the constraints of their
time, can these signs, these diagrams of
spaces become the generative matrices of
today's project work ?15, 16

. They might. Architectural theory
shares with art theory a peculiar
characteristic: it is prescriptive. So the
series of signs and articulations that have
just been described may undoubtedly
prove a useful model for architects
engaged in a perpetual search for new
support disciplines, even if it is not
clear whether systems of non-verbal
signs such as space proceed from
similar concepts as verbal systems.
However, the real importance of this
research lies in the question it asks about
the nature of architecture rather than in
the making of architecture. This is not
without recalling the perverse and
hypothetical search for the very origins
of architecture. Remember: at the outset,
does architecture produce copies or
models ? If it cannot imitate an order,
can it constitute it, whether it is the world
or society ? Must architecture create its
own model, if it has no created model ?
Positive answers inevitably imply some
archetype. But as this archetype cannot
exist outside architecture, architecture
must produce it itself. It thus becomes
some sort of an essence that precedes
existence. So the architect is once again
`the man who conceives the form of the
building without manipulating materials
himself.' He conceives the pyramid, this
ultimate model of reason."
Architecture becomes a cosa mentale'
and the forms conceived by the
architect ensure the domination of the
idea over matter.
PART 2 :
The Labyrinth
Making Space Distinct
(or The Experience of Space)

ix. . . . Should I intensify the
quarantine in the chambers of the
Pyramid of reason ? Shall I sink to

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