Il caso “Rassegna”. L’anomalia della regola
Creators: name: Morpurgo, Guido
Publisher: name: La Rivista di Engramma
Year: 2022
Subjects: Rassegna
Recinti
Vittorio Gregotti
Pierluigi Cerri

description: In the crowded panorama of Italian architecture journals of the 1980s and 1990s, among the most authoritative at the international level, the twenty-year trajectory of “Rassegna“ is completely autonomous with respect to any other previous or subsequent publication. The apparent heterogeneity of the titles between 1979 and 1998 traces an argumentative, geographical and scalar itinerary from Small Objects to Big Machines, which builds its own logic in Gregotti’s incessant activity of “making magazines”, freed from the task - entrusted to the symmetrical Casabella - of dealing with contemporary architecture in direct contact. The collection of architectural anamorphoses gathered in the unusual “Rassegna” of disciplinary themes seems to reinforce the monographic principle of the brief but intense experiment Edilizia Moderna, proposing a diagonal look at the culture of the project. The critically dissected practices construct, issue after issue, a special koinè produced by the interaction of knowledge and the exchange between the different declinations of design. The graphic design of the magazine itself, devised by Pierluigi Cerri, is both invention and programme: the titles of the volumes are in brackets, thus referring to the fact that each subject belongs to an extended and prismatic project discourse, rooted in an uncompromising and aligned editorial policy. “Rassegna” programmatically tackles the knots of “modification”, catalysing the arguments arising from the ‘Gregotti-device’ to rework the paradox of a culture of modern design resolved in its own incompleteness. The 76 idiosyncratic fragments of the journal, which is itself ‘interrupted’, restore the breadth of this observatory contended between rule and exception, between principle and its contradiction, between assertion and short circuit. These splinters of archaeology of modern architectural knowledge constitute in themselves a specific chapter among disciplinary journals, for having demonstrated the critical and argumentative extension of the design culture that they can still transmit by means of enclosures through which to trace the boundaries of the architecture of the environment through “the faculty of choosing and judging”. Perhaps the ‘quantum’ essence of “Rassegna”, of its transmuting visionary, oneiric, paradigmatic and culturalist figure, lies in having attempted to re-establish the balance between means and ends of architecture through the long-term dimension of the theory of the project and its multiple materials. It is the last creative manifesto of a coherent idea of disciplinary culture based on the anomaly of the rule: Warburgian “anxious memory, transformed into knowledge”. As an experimentation surface for a theoretical model of research in architecture, “Rassegna” still traces possible paths through an enclosure that now needs to be re-observed from the outside. In this perspective, “Rassegna” represents a project that can ideally be continued because it places the theme of form at the centre of architectural research, diagonally crossing the complex territories of design culture, different in scale and implications, and in this way it still expresses its value as a reconstruction of disciplinary knowledge on the basis of modern materials.