Numero monografico "Riviste di architettura. Traiettorie"
Abstract
In the crowded panorama of Italian architecture journals of the 1980s and 1990s, the twenty-year trajectory of “Rassegna” is among the most authoritative at the international level, 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.
