ABSTRACT
The period of reconstruction had specific effects on several Italian cities. For example Milan’s expansion during the economic miracle, with the displacement of populations which went along with it, had exposed new discontinuities in the formerly coherent Italian urban situation (Foot 2001). At the same time, throughout the developed world the generalized disregard for urban context in the architectural proposals of the 1960s and 1970s provoked a reaction in which the issue of memory as physical and poetic content came to the fore, nowhere more so than in Italy. By the 1960s, historical forms free of their recent fascist taint again became the subject of serious research by Ernesto Rogers and his collaborators not only in the field of anonymous urban fabric, the morphological approach favoured by Saverio Muratori, but also in the form of monumental structures. The group which had gathered around Rogers during his editorship of Casabella had explored these historical issues as well as critiques of contemporary design through the pages of the magazine, and from this combination emerged a scepticism about the functionalist claims of orthodox modernism and the local individualism of Team 10. In this search for architectural and urban authenticity this grouping favoured the typological approach (Kirk 2005b: 182–85). This new avant-garde movement (referred to variously as la Tendenza or neo-rationalism) presented their proposals in boldly geometric forms, and from this circle Aldo Rossi (1931–97) was to emerge firstly as a significant urban theorist, and then as the creator of potent architectural images in drawn and built form. For Rossi the political context of this focus was the type of authenticity which intellectuals often ascribed to working class life rather than a romanticization of the previous social conditions, but from his early career his work was to be suggestive of nostalgia. However, in a period marked by considerable social unrest, Rossi’s position on the political Left was to lead to him being banned from teaching in Italian universities by the government, and the pursuit of an academic career outside Italy.
