L'azzurro del cielo di Modena

The projects built by Aldo Rossi represent a coherent biographical journey that, as it unfolds, more explicitly clarifies an original process of composition and decomposition of discrete pieces within a typological reasoning of architecture that is essentially aimed at interpreting a whole host of ever-changing themes. At the same time, his written reflections produced during the same timeframe, jotted down in the Quaderni Azzurri contain some profound general insights into the concept of life and death, partly conditioned by the serious car accident that left him bedridden and immobile in hospital for a significant length of time. With this in mind, the extension of the San Cataldo cemetery is what we perhaps still to this day believe is the original example of this process of assembly and disassembly as played out in the urban dimension; but this primordial machine of Modena is also the direct consequence of those existential reflections on death and the structure of his deeply marked, ailing body as a series of discrete elements - fractures to be put back together.