“When I describe my projects, or redesign them, I realize that I rediscover things or get the awkward feeling of something already seen; but characteristics, memories, associations that produce an unexpected effect always surface. Whenever I talk about a project or redesign it, it becomes an object of affection.” (Aldo Rossi).

The book, which systematically brings together the project reports written by Aldo Rossi, one of the leading architects in the second half of the twentieth century, in the course of his professional work, shows how he used writing as a true design device.

For Rossi, writing a report was an opportunity to give shape to a reflection on a certain place, a historical reality or a circumstance, using a completely personal narrative style with the same communicative and emotional strength that we find in his sketches and drawings.

This book offers the opportunity to discover what Rossi thought of his projects, the hopes he entrusted to them and what paths he took in preparing them. Leafing through the pages and observing the very beautiful and often unpublished drawings that accompany them, one feels the anxiety that crept into them, the extent of the apprehension that the architect felt in finishing a project and imagining its becoming, in prefiguring the hiatus that separates things as one imagines them from what they will be like once built. By following the thread of these questions and the feelings that accompanied them, it is possible to grasp new and even unpredictable implications and aspects of projects and works that earned him fame and marked the career of Rossi, who had a global influence on the architectural culture of the second half of the twentieth century.

The book was conceived on the occasion of the major Aldo Rossi retrospective, The Architect and the Cities, curated by Albergo Ferlenga and presented under the aegis of Margherita Guccione for the MAXXI in Rome (10 March – 17 October 2021).