Exhibition
“Carlo Aymonino. Fedelta’ al tradimento / Loyalty to Betrayal”
Triennale, Milan, May 14 – August 22, 2021
From an idea by Livia and Silvia Aymonino
Curated by Manuel Orazi
Exhibition Design by Federica Parolini
Catalog edited by Manuel Orazi (Milan: Electa, 2021)

All framed within a variety of contexts: from professional studies to vacation trips, nude studies and humorous journals created for his children. Drawing was for Aymonino a way to explore, understand and imagine reality, present and future. As a true, visionary architect is supposed to do. “Drawing is theory” I once posited,² and Aymonino’s works clearly show drawing as a search for knowledge, even though he was always very wary to establish direct ties between drawing and design, theory and practice. He never missed the chance to note his “rejection of [any] compact and programmatic coherence: it is not necessary for theory and practice to coincide, for the personality to be homogeneous and unitary; the more one seeks and experiments, the more diversity, contradictions, negations, and obstacles arise.” ³ Yet, for example, the tension between architectural figuration and urban studies remained a constant in Aymonino’s professional and scholarly career, coming to a moment of high synthesis perhaps only in the case of the school campus in Pesaro, as Aymonino himself has admitted: 

The Pesaro Campus seems to me the only successful case, in my experience, in which urban analysis, albeit in a mediated form, joins the various design components and contributes to the architectural solution. The anonymity of the southern suburbs of Pesaro suggests the desire for something representative, something that constitutes image and memory, the absent baggage of collective identity.⁴ 

The Pesaro Campus occupies, rightly so, a central role in the exhibition, especially with Aymonino’s celebrated drawing (aptly blown up to frame and illustrate a landmark partition within the exhibition space), Il liceo nella tempesta di Giorgione (The High-School in Giorgione’s Storm) – a witty title given to one of his studies for the volumetric articulation of the school (through one of his signature, and most beautiful, perspective views), imagined against a backdrop evoking the famous painting of the Venetian Renaissance master. (Figs. 3, 4.)

Around the core of professional works, and drawings for and about them (sometimes done, similarly to his dear friend and colleague Aldo Rossi, after the definition of the project or the realization of the work, in an on-going process of formal and spatial research), the exhibition weaves through also a series of documents of Aymonino’s rich and complex life, both in his personal stories and within the public sphere, namely for his political engagement with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). As an outcome of this engagement, came also Aymonino’s unique experience in civic administration when he served as Alderman for Interventions in the Historic Center for the Municipality of Rome in the 1980s, during a period of PCI led civic administrations.

For Aymonino, politics and architecture really never merged completely (or substantially, as in in the case of other famous modern architects who served in public administrations, such as Marinus Dudok in Hilversum, The Netherlands, or Ernst May in Frankfurt and Martin Wagner in Berlin), and Aymonino clearly understood the need to speak different languages, relative to the specific different fields of operation, with only occasional and limited overlapping. Clear, though, were Aymonino interests and passions in both realms, to which he remained faithful throughout his career. “Between Form and Reform,” as late Roman architectural historian Mario Manieri-Elia once commented about his friend and colleague.⁵

Similar was the case for academic administration, in which Aymonino had plunged in the late 1970s by taking the reins, as Director (but comparable to the current office of Rector), of the Istituto Universitario di Architettura (IUAV), in Venice. He was elected to the office after the tumultuous and disruptive years of the early 1970s, during Carlo Scarpa’s unhappy stint at academic administration, after he had succeeded IUAV’s visionary leader of several decades, Giuseppe Samonà (who had invited Aymonino to the IUAV in the first place, as a young faculty, in 1963). As IUAV Director, Aymonino put to good use his innate and distinctive capacity at organizing teams and gathering talents, as he had done with great foresight when he invited a then fairly unknown young architect and theorist, Aldo Rossi, to join him as his assistant in Venice – Aymonino and Rossi had met through the same national political circles of the PCI and when Aymonno, since the mid-1950s, had started to collaborate as Roman correspondent for Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ Casabella, where Rossi was a regular editor. By renewing with a more modern and more cross-disciplinary approach Saverio Muratori’s legacy of urban morphology studies at the IUAV, Aymonino launched and pursued, also by leveraging Rossi’s interests and expertise, a whole new season of urban studies, thus helping create Rossi’s springboard for his landmark and once-in-a-century book The Architecture of the City of 1966. As Rafael Moneo has pointed out, “one of Carlo Aymonino’s virtues was the extraordinary generosity he showed towards his architect colleagues whom he respected and loved. We need only think of his relationship with Aldo Rossi. Carlo’s support enabled Aldo to enjoy a series of unique opportunities that were very helpful in the consolidation of his career.” ⁶ Albeit with less recognition, Aymonino eventually went on to publish himself two very important books, illustrated also by his insightful sketches: Origini e sviluppo della città moderna (Origins and Growth of the Modern City, 1965) and Il significato delle città (The Meaning of Cities, 1975). The exhibition features also the originals of all these landmark books, as well as other publications by Aymonino and his research teams.

Those research documents clearly show his personality of a “thinking architect, operating in our current difficult conditions,” as he liked to see himself and those around him sharing his principles and approach.⁷

In spite of Aymonino’s caution in establishing a causation relationship between analysis and design, he himself acknowledged, with a realism clearly resonating from his political culture, that his research efforts at the IUAV (with the team known as “Gruppo Architettura”) were aimed at defining “a scientific basis for the comprehension of the city that would permit a critical insertion of the project into urban growth.” ⁸ (Fig. 7.)