Figure 1 San Cataldo Cemetery by Aldo Rossi. Photograph by Andrea Pirisi.
Introduction
Despite Aldo Rossi and Gordon Matta-Clark practicing in seemingly disparate contexts, their separate arrival at common forms of silence and void points to an architecture of absence that makes visible the political and economic forces behind architecture. Using a selection of their projects and writing, the formal absence in their work is illustrated and thereafter set in their political contexts of 1970s Italy and New York. Both Rossi and Matta-Clark were profoundly affected by encounters with death, the influence of which is also briefly explored. By comparing Rossi and Matta-Clark through these lenses of absence, this essay observes a common use of silence and void while highlighting the nuances in their work that arise from their individual contexts. It points to a possibility of architecture that uses absence to reveal, but at the risk of silence becoming complicit, voids read as malevolent, and the very absence being left open to (mis)interpretation.
Absence and Presence
Aureli (2008) argues that Aldo Rossi was influenced by what Paul Klee refers to as sichtbar machen. Tronti (1966) defines this as: “to make visible: to say clearly in order to be understood, at the risk of not interpreting very well things intrinsically obscure.” Aureli interprets this concept in architecture as making visible the spatial relationships that arose from capitalist production. In his seminal (1966) L’architettura della città, Rossi argued that buildings cannot be politically ‘opposed’, because those that are realized are “always those of the dominant class;” but yet he also insists that architecture in its self-referential culture can be considered independent from its time and place (Rossi, 1982). In his later writing, Rossi repeatedly refers to a muteness and silence he strives to achieve in his architecture: through this silence, and its clarity and apparent absence of meaning, Rossi intended to ultimately make visible the political project of the city. Whereas Rossi advocated for and practiced firmly within the limits of an architectural discipline, Gordon Matta-Clark occupied a blurred boundary between art and architecture, and often activism. His best known works involved the cutting of buildings to reveal their ‘pregnant void’, and his art practice was continually in dialogue with architecture and the built environment. Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell University between 1962-1968, and may have been aware of Rossi through teachers like Colin Rowe —who like Rossi would later advocate a similar return to the traditional city in Collage City (1978)— or contemporaries like Peter Eisenman the editor of first English edition of Rossi’s The Architecture of the City in 1984, and, according to Graham (2012) was reading Oppositions magazine in which Rossi was a contributor. Their relation may not have been any more than this passing awareness, but Matta-Clark too was politically engaged with the architectural world, notably with the Anarchitecture (anarchist + architecture) group in New York, and like Rossi his exposition of capital’s influence on the built environment also was based on a jarring vocabulary of void and absence.
Figure 2 Photograph of Splitting (1974) by Gordon Matta Clark. From Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark
After graduating from architecture at Cornell University, Matta-Clark remained in Ithaca and helped Dennis Oppenheim and Robert Smithson in the influential 1969 Earth Art exhibition at the Andrew Dickson White Museum of Art. Matta-Clark was exposed to Smithson’s ideas on the dialectic between site and nonsite, and entropy as a creative disciple. The exhibition highlighted prevailing challenges to art as commodity, object and context, art and its documentation, all themes that can be traced throughout Matta-Clark’s work (de Monchaux, 2017). However, whereas the land artists continued to retreat to the natural landscape, Matta-Clark went on to firmly engage with the context of the urban condition and its social realities.
Matta-Clark’s decade between graduating and his premature death in 1978 was prolific, and he undertook several projects, often collaborative, socially engaged and/or critiques of architecture and city planning: including the restaurant FOOD (1971-1973), or public artworks like Fresh Air Cart (1972) and Graffiti Truck (1973). But it is his building cuts of residences in Bronx Floors (1972-73) and Splitting (1974), a warehouse in Days End (1975), townhouses in Conical Intersect (1975), and a commercial building in Office Baroque (1977) that are best known and most evidently explore the formal, sculptural elements of void. All of Matta-Clark’s architectural interventions are subjected to buildings already slated for demolition, rendering them temporary and ephemeral. The surgical nature of Matta-Clark’s cuts (in Splitting, the cut seems like an incision) highlighted the buildings’ failure and decay in the cycle of consumption and production, or as Bessa (2017) suggest, that “the body of architecture is dead.” Beyond the literal void created by the cuts, this ephemerality of the works encouraged an atmosphere of solemn silence, reflected in the absence of any people in Matta-Clark’s photographs documenting his building cuts.
For Conical Intersect (1975) Matta-Clark was inspired by Anthony McCall’s film Line Describing a Cone. The film showed a cone of light being projected in a room, and the form of this light (a non-material shape) was translated to an absence of material in the building cut (Lee, 2000). Given his socially-driven practice, this silence brings to question the efficacy of Matta-Clark’s building cuts. Pamela Lee (1998) describes Matta-Clark’s surprise at the reaction of the Parisian left-wing media to Conical Intersect (1975) —who considered his ‘artistic hole’—the pretentious and decadent gesture of an absent artist. Matta-Clark hadn’t realised the sensitivity towards emptiness and void in the Les Halles area, which had a recent history of clearances with the construction of the Pompidou adding insult to injury. Conversely, in an interview with Donald Wall, Matta-Clark recounted the best reaction he received to Conical Intersect from a 70-year-old concierge, who saw the holes as “an experiment in bringing in light and air into spaces that never had enough of either” (Wrona, 2017). The geometric purity of the building cuts, in contrast to the wanton rubble of the bulldozer, left Matta-Clark’s interventions silent and open to interpretation.
Figure 3 Photomontage of Conical Intersect (1975) by Gordon Matta Clark. From Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark
Rossi also employs restrained forms to induce ambiguity and openness to interpretation. Unlike Matta-Clark, Rossi published his theories, where he called for a return to a rational architecture based on ‘type’ and ‘form’, and reflected on his own built work in (1981) A Scientific Autobiography. At the time of his first book, he had built very little, but by the second he had an opportunity to apply his theory in formative projects at the Galaterese housing complex (1967-74) with Carlo Aymonino, and at the Cemetery in Modena (1971-1984). In Autobiography, Rossi narrates once finishing a lecture in Zurich by describes his architecture as standing mute and cold with reference to Hölderlin’s poem Hälfte des Lebens meaning an absence of words rather than muteness—shunning any linguistic gesturing to appear fundamental, outside of fashion, questioning the concept of style. They are ‘silent’ much like Louis Kahn’s work, who also employed geometrically pure, monumental form and called for silence in architecture.
In Watson’s (2018) discussion on the influence of Raymond Roussel in Rossi’s Autobiography, she notes Manfredo Tafuri’s observation that Rossi’s architecture says nothing, but through this silence new memories could be formed. Memory, individual and collective, seem a continued preoccupation for Rossi. Both Gamble (1997) and Lobsinger (2002) observe in Rossi’s writing a wish to forget architecture. Gamble argues that Rossi uses silence to forget, but that in his complicit silence he is perhaps no better than his contemporary utopian visionaries. Lobsinger suggests that Rossi’s ‘compulsion to repeat’ in his drawings and built forms is a “realist denial of subjective expression for objective totality and the acquiescence to the subjective within the creative process and in architecture,” (emphasis added) reflecting Rossi’s struggle in reconciling his earlier call for a rational architecture with his own inevitable, subjective biographical influences. Rather than a formalism and rationalism associated with fascism, according to Huet (1977) Rossi admitted a predilection towards socialist realism, and with the tendenza he sought a return to this by falling back on forms and types in the collective memory.
Figure 4 Gallaratese housing complex by Aldo Rossi, in 2008. Gabriele Scotti
Politically engaged architecture in the 1970s
Rossi had joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in 1956 at a time when many were leaving, and continued his political engagement as an architecture student by contributing to Casabella continuitá, then edited by Ernesto Rogers. While teaching in Venice between 1963-65 under Carlo Aymonino, a small group of like-minded architects influenced by the PCI formed around Rossi and became known as ‘Scuola di Venezia,’ known for their highly theoretical approach to architecture (Aureli, 2008). This would be the germ for the much broader 70s Italian architectural movement known as la tendenza, named after a 1966 article in which Rossi wrote: “the architecture of reason as architecture of tendency” (Hays, 1998). Rossi was their most prominent practitioner and theorist but the movement also included Carlo Aymonino and Marxist architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri. The group had a wide range of influences, from Mario Tronti to Antonio Negri and Massimo Cacciari, and in The Project of Autonomy (2008) Aureli compellingly illustrates the influences of Italian leftist philosophy and political movements like operaismo and autonomismo. The group gained international recognition after their 1973 Milan Triennale exhibition Architettura Razionale curated by Rossi.
Their affiliations came with difficulties in the hostile political environment of Italy in the 70s; for example, a number of the movement’s members held positions at universities that were stopped from teaching in the autunno caldo (1969-70), and although they naturally experienced internal disagreements their writing often supported each other’s ideas. Yet this native political engagement gave la tendenza a unique vitality and context that was not translated once their ideas spread outside of Italy, and it is this political context that Rossi was responding to. In the face of rapid late-modernist urban expansion (as a function of capitalism), Rossi urged a return to the traditional city, ‘type’ and ‘form’ that, having stood the test of time, could be reinterpreted in a new architecture that would reconnect to society and could be imbued with new collective memories. Gamble (1997) criticises Rossi for romanticising a past that never existed: “the return to essences is only contemplated through the silence of archaic forms that remain elusively fictive, conversely committing him to the same utopian delusions of his adversaries.” Perhaps this is illustrated at the Galaterese housing complex, which after its completion in 1972 housed homeless people under pressure from Communist League groups, to be abandoned just two years later. Now reoccupied, the buildings seem to be withstanding change of occupants, but equally their ‘silence’ did not save them from initial abandonment.
Figure 5 Photographic collage, property deed, site map, and photograph for Fake Estates (1974) by Gordon Matta Clark, assembled posthumously.
From Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
Influenced by Structuralism, La Tendenza staunchly reiterated the autonomy of the architectural discipline, and Rossi himself advocated for a new urban science based on the fundamental vocabulary of architecture; they were not interested by notions of interdisciplinary practice. The influence of the movement could be seen in the experiments with language by their contemporaries, the New York Five (Botazzi, 2012), with whom Colin Rowe was associated. This introspective disciplinary straight-jacket is perhaps one reason for Matta-Clark’s detest for the architectural fraternity that taught him, as made evident in his performance of (1976) Window Blowout. In 1970s New York notorious for social disorder, Matta-Clark was a product of his time in understanding how architecture and art could serve the community (Bessa, 2017). By 1975, Arthur Drexler described the New York Five as retreating from the political, making architecture the least likely instrument “with which to accomplish the revolution” (de Monchaux, 2017). By exposing the effects of housing, urban decay and gentrification Matta-Clark revealed the powerlessness of the architectural profession in the face of these adversities: “They were autonomous but without influence” (Ursprung, 2012).
Like Rossi, Matta-Clark also founded a working group to share their architectural ideas. The name ‘Anarchitecture,’ a portmanteau of anarchy and architecture, is an example of the wordplay Matta-Clark often used in his art. The group was more a short-lived, informal gathering of his artist friends to discuss their personal reactions to urban space, and more than likely helped develop Matta-Clark’s own thoughts on the subject. Despite his disillusion with the architectural profession the very name betrays his persistent interest in architecture and urban space: “We were thinking about metaphoric voids, gaps, left-over spaces, places that were not developed […] metaphoric in the sense that their interest or value wasn’t in their possible use….” (Walker, 2004). Matta-Clark considered the leftover voids in cities as waste products of the capitalist system. Hans Haacke was already documenting slums in New York in (1971) Shapolsky et al., but whereas Haacke documented the consequences of the capitalist system, in (1973) Reality Estates: Fake Estates, Matta-Clark not only documented the voids in urban space, but made direct intervention by buying empty lots that were unusable and inaccessible, thereby also questioning the use value of space. Like for his building cuts, Matta-Clark’s photographs of these lots seem eerily silent because of the absence of people or context; they seem cold, empty and utilitarian, a reflection of the system that produced these spaces.
Figure 6 Gordon Matta-Clark working at Descending Steps for Batan, Yvon Lambert Gallery, Paris, 1977 Photograph by Harry Gruyaert
While working together on Conical Intersect, Gerry Hovagimyan recounts that he and Matta-Clark talked about Situationist ideas of spectacle, (Attlee & Le Feuvre, 2003) suggesting that Matta-Clark was aware of the movement’s ideas, including perhaps their interest in the layers of the city and their concept of detournement— a technique developed in the 1950s by the Letterist International to turn expressions of capitalism against itself. The purchase of these plots for Fake Estates seem related to this concept, but since Matta-Clark never exhibited this project himself, it is unclear what the eventual outcome would have been. Although the sculptural projects of his building cuts are of most interest to art historians, they were arguably the least accessible of his work. Fake Estates illustrates Matta-Clark’s activist impulse for direct intervention, and in his later years he had planned to move away from cutting to more direct community involvement.
Rossi’s committed engagement with the Italian intelligentsia through la tendenza lent his theories an international stage in his later years and influenced a generation of architects, but the dilution of ideas so rooted in the Italian context meant his call to return to a silent, rational architecture often became pastiche instead. Unlike Rossi, who remained firmly within the limit of architecture, Matt-Clark’s association with the Anarchitecture group is likened by Jordan (2017) to Joseph Beuys and the Free International University. Matta-Clark’s theory was far less rigorous than Rossi’s, and his art practice had a smaller audience. The ambiguity and lack of accessibility of the building cuts usually rendered them exclusive for an art audience, but the activist compulsion that drove his actions is likely to have had a more direct and significant impact through his smaller, community-engaged work.
Mortality
Antonio Sergio Bessa (2017) paints a vivid picture of the context Matta-Clark arrived into after returning to New York. In 1970, in the shadow of the Vietnam war, a townhouse in the Greenwich Village, used as a bomb factory by members of the Weather Underground, accidentally blew up only a block away from the family home Matta-Clark was staying in. In another incident in 1973, his only cousin died in a building collapse. All this at a time when the World Trade Centre towers by Minoru Yamasaki were coming to completion whilst his Pruitt Igoe housing in St Louis was being demolished. Charles Jencks would later exclaim: “Modern architecture died in St. Louis, Missouri on July 15, 1972, at 3.32 pm.” Matta-Clark was surrounded not just by this violence and destruction, but the empty voids in lives and the urban fabric they left behind. It is not difficult to see the links between these events and his first explorations into building cuts in Bronx Floors (1972-1973). Later, the death of his twin brother Sebastian (Batan) in 1976 prompted a renewed drive in his work, and the mournful performance of daily digging in Descending Steps for Batan (1977) is perhaps the most literal yet poetic exploration of void and absence.
Figure 7 Untitled (1948) by Giorgio de Chirico From tacticalaesthetics.org
Figure 8 Aldo Rossi, Perspective Composition, Teatro del Mondo, Venice 1980. Centre Pompidou Musee Nationale d’Art Moderne. © Eredi Aldo Rossi. Courtesy Fondazione Aldo Rossi. From http://www.studiointernational.com
Rossi’s practice was also at a pivotal moment after an encounter with death. In Autobiography he describes the profound effect a near fatal car accident had, particularly on his work at the Cemetery in Modena. Johnson (1982) describes at Modena an ‘architecture of shadows,’ and describes the influence of metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico on the architecture and the drawings that led to it: the loneliness and silent melancholy and mystery of de Chirico’s paintings, are made concrete in Rossi’s cemetery where “shadows walk in Rossi’s shadowy cemetery, a city of the dead that approaches the surreal” (Johnson, 1982). Watson (2018) argues that opening Autobiography with a passage on death allowed him to insinuate his rebirth. The car crash would’ve sharpened Rossi onto his legacy, and given his architecture was characterised by an absence, Autobiography was perhaps an attempt to explain his more idiosyncratic ideas to complement the theories of his youth. Whereas Rossi would at least leave some built projects, Matt-Clark’s ephemeral building cuts did not only themselves embody void and absence but were inherently destined for silence because of their always imminent demolition. Perhaps this is why Matta-Clark documented his work so fervently in photography, film, drawings/sketches and fragments from site, so that like Rossi there would be a record that went some way to explain the absence of his work.
Conclusion
Both Rossi and Matta-Clark were politically engaged in the troubled period of the 1970s, but also seem resigned that architecture (as practiced at the time) was ultimately powerless. Whereas Matta-Clark shuns the profession (and the autonomy for which Rossi advocated) and turns to art and activism, Rossi urges for timeless ‘type’ and ‘form’ that, through its arguably complicit silence, enables one to ‘forget’ architecture. Matta-Clark turned to art because he felt that was the only place he could practice, but his art was not necessarily high art made to be commodified. His early building cuts and exhibitions did have an exclusive audience, but in later projects he had desire to be more participatory in the community. Whereas Rossi insisted on the limit and autonomy of architecture, Matta-Clark seemed to be much more interested in the dissolution of the limits of architecture, or rather pointing out the complicity of architecture in the urban problems he encountered, from the outside. Both their work was clearly rooted in unique socio-political contexts in the 60s and 70s, but I have attempted to illustrate that both came to a similar vocabulary of silence, void and absence to make visible (sichtbar machen) the spatial relationship of architecture within the capitalist system of production. Curiously, they also helped canonise the collective efforts of their working groups (la tendenza and Anarchitecture), but perhaps at the cost of the founding egalitarian principles of these groups. Their comparison is made difficult by the premature death of Matta-Clark leaving us only with an archive that is being continually reinterpreted by curators and is not as immediately accessible for research. Unlike Matta-Clark, Rossi had a chance to publish his in the highly idiosyncratic Autobiography, but he remains best known for his first theoretical work of The Architecture of the City. The unique character of the Italian context has been lost to his now international audience, precisely because his intended silent/mute/sprachlos character allowed other architects to impart their own interpretations onto his work. Similarly, the sprachlos quality of Matta-Clark’s building cuts allows each new exhibition of his work to re-contextualise it, increasingly with a greater focus on his work outside of his building cuts. This essay deliberately avoided discussions on the definitions of art and architecture, but as Jessamyn Fiore (daughter of Matta-Clark’s widow) points out, Matta-Clark’s blurring of disciplinary boundaries and community engagement might today be called socially engaged practice; interestingly the 2015 Turner prize winners, Assemble, were an architecture collective that never purported to be artists.
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New Minds Eye 