Resolving the Theoretically Irreconcilable: Aldo Rossi’s Giant Kitchenware Models as Generative Object--Subjects

Abstract

This essay investigates Aldo Rossi’s coffee vessel models as exhibited in his “Domestic Theater” project as a mediator between conflicting ideas in his architectural and urban theory. Entangled with Rossi’s paintings, kitchenware designs, and architectural projects, the coffee vessel models derived from both imaginary fantasies and manufactured utensils, modeling various conceptual and practical prototypes that characterize his corpus at large. Negotiating between human beings and lifeless artifacts, domestic objects and theatrical settings, fictional scenes and real-world objects, the scale-less and displaced kitchenware models accommodate the contradictions of Rossi’s theory. By analyzing the analogical and repetitive operations in their development process, these models are posited as autonomous, generative and impenetrable object-subjects that engagingly advance architectural theory in a disciplinary sense. I argue that it is the physical existence of the kitchenware models—not the textual elaborations and logical deductions—that masters Rossi’s unresolved struggle between dissonant yet irreducible ideas, and completes “the difficult whole.”