Evocative Sense or Figura? ...in the Drawings +/or Text of Aldo Rossi

Abstract

My research is a consideration of the nature of drawing the questioning of an evocative or figural sense in drawing is its frame. Specifically this report presents the summaries of a meditation provoked by four drawings by Aldo Rossi. More abstractly it is my uncovering of drawing in architecture. In this case and generally, drawing in architecture is not only, or necessarily, evocations of space, but figura of idea and expression. A premise that images are expressive complicates simple distinctions between drawing as image and text as message. Questions of distinctions, and dependencies, between drawing and text are significant in this report. This premise also raises the issue of incongruence between the making and the reading, the conceptual intent and the empirical effect. This suggests ambiguity and manifold interpretation of drawing. An arbitrary and limited selection of Rossi's drawings has been subject to my interpretation. Rather than pretend a universal perspective and endeavour persuasion of a reader to my speculations, I hope only to qualify and illuminate my readings. Declarations of the specific conditions of my encounter and an explanatory catalogue of primary and secondary affective references and sources surround these interpretations. In this report, these interpretations follow a discussion of my encounter with these drawings, these drawings in the architectural discipline, and of the notions of drawing and text which this encounter provoked.