The words from Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—”The city is not made of this, but of relationships between the measures of its space and the events of the past. But the city does not tell its past, it contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the edges of streets, in the grids of windows, in the banisters of stairs, in the antennas of lightning rods, in the poles of flags, each segment in turn lined with scratches, serrations, notches, flourishes”—are brought to life in photographs by the skilled hand and eye of Gabriele Basilico, documenting the architectural work of Aldo Rossi. The volume Gabriele Basilico Photographs Aldo Rossi, published by Humboldt Books, for the first time gathers the photographs through which Basilico narrated Rossi’s work for nearly 20 years, accompanying his rise to prominence in international architecture.
The recently published volume complements the visual narrative with a significant textual component. Each featured building is accompanied by technical and conceptual introductions provided by Aldo Rossi himself on his works. It also includes two essays written by the Milanese architect for two of Gabriele Basilico’s photography books, Seaports (1990) and On the Train to Europe (1993), which offer deeper insight into the reciprocal bond between the two artists. Finally, reflections by Chiara Spangaro and Pier Paolo Tamburelli allow for a profound immersion into Basilico’s photographic poetics. This editorial project is realized in collaboration with the Gabriele Basilico Archive and the Aldo Rossi Foundation.
Rossi’s designed buildings are not merely aesthetic or purely functional; they are places that hold a history and express a relationship with the city and the people who pass by and observe them, sometimes distantly. Every detail, every corner, every staircase, and every window encapsulates a memory, like an indelible scratch, a tangible sign of the past. This perspective serves as a metaphor for humanity, which populates the world, inhabits urban spaces, and leaves a mark of its passage throughout its existence.
“Basilico provides me with a kind of X-ray of my architectures, or of the archetypes that always return in my images and in my imagination in the same way,” is how Aldo Rossi described Gabriele Basilico’s photographic approach.
Basilico documents Rossi’s buildings using black and white film, stripping away the chromatic component, a key element in Luigi Ghirri’s documentary studies of the architect’s work. The black and white immediately strikes the viewer, highlighting all the details of a building and its context. Basilico’s compositions, so sharp, defined, and at the same time elaborate, allow us to instantly perceive the luminous and tonal contrasts and the material variations in Rossi’s urban projects. In this case, desaturation becomes a graphic mode: with black and white, Basilico aims to assimilate the photograph to a drawing rather than a romantic representation of the building. Shadows intersect on the asphalt and invade porticoes, casting beams of light onto the ground, thus adding greater suggestion to the framing.
The almost methodical attention evident in Basilico’s shots focuses on the repeated patterns of geometric shapes. The generally square windows, the regularly spaced entrances, and the immense columns reminiscent of ancient Greek temples define Rossi’s stylistic signature.
Dormer windows peek out at the top of buildings, architectural devices to allow more light, capitalizing on the building’s verticality. The triangle, the circle, and other elementary figures—also used on the book’s cover—are the distinctive marks of the Centro Direzionale in Perugia. The shot of the central body of the Bonnefanten Museum, resembling a silo, recalls the industrial photographic documentation of the Becher couple.
Cities are therefore not merely an intersection of streets and paths, of planned cubic meters, but are spaces of constructed things. In Basilico’s photographs, however, we also notice an aura of timelessness: we observe the complete absence of the human figure, as if time, in those photos and in those places, were suspended. As in De Chirico’s paintings, time seems to stand still, and the clock hands appear frozen at a precise hour.
“Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules absurd, their perspectives deceptive, and everything hides another thing,” Italo Calvino wrote, again in Invisible Cities.
Thanks to these photographs, we can appreciate all the facets and angles of Aldo Rossi’s works. And if in his buildings every detail conceals another, so too does every frame by Basilico hide another.
