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.”

摘要

这篇文章调查了奥尔多罗西在他的“国内剧院”项目中展示的咖啡容器模型，作为他的建筑和城市理论中相互冲突的思想之间的中介。与罗西的画作、厨具设计和建筑项目纠缠不清，咖啡容器模型源自虚构的幻想和制造的器具，塑造了各种概念和实践原型，这些原型是他整个语料库的特征。在人类与无生命的人工制品、家庭物品与戏剧场景、虚构场景与现实世界的物品之间进行谈判，无尺度和移位的厨具模型适应了罗西理论的矛盾。通过分析其开发过程中的类比和重复操作，这些模型被假定为自主的，生成性和难以理解的对象主题，在学科意义上积极推进建筑理论。我认为，正是厨具模型的物理存在——而不是文本阐述和逻辑推论——掌握了罗西在不和谐但不可简化的想法之间悬而未决的斗争，并完成了“困难的整体”。