Aldo Rossi in Gabriele Basilico’s photographs: a friendship shaped by Domus

"Today we are witnessing the development of a culture of architecture that is transmitted above all through its image and therefore through the interpretation given to it by the photographer: his role, in fact, in the fabrication of the information process is perhaps equal only to his responsibility in deciding which image will represent architecture in an absolute way".

Gabriele Basilico wrote in a short article in issue 616 of Domus in April 1981, in an invitation to involve photographers as “irreplaceable leaders of optical-iconic representation in the process of transforming architectural culture”: the photographer's eye – the title of his article – is, for Basilico, an active tool in the critical narrative of architecture. 

Six years later, in 1987, Domus commissioned the photographer to shoot Casa Aurora, a building in Turin housing the offices of the Gruppo Finanziario Tessile, designed that same year by Aldo Rossi with Gianni Braghieri.

This was the first real opportunity to meet the Milanese architect, in Aldo Rossi's studio in Via Santa Maria della Porta in Milan, which led to a friendship based on “harmony and encounters that were both diachronic and episodic,” as Chiara Spangaro writes in the book Gabriele Basilico fotografa Aldo Rossi, published by Humboldt Books in collaboration with the Gabriele Basilico Archive and the Aldo Rossi Foundation.

Since that 1987 shoot, Basilico has followed the career of Aldo Rossi for nearly two decades – initially through commissioned work, and then almost out of a personal need – accompanying him on his rise to become a leading figure in international architecture. This volume collects for the first time seventy-two photographs that Gabriele Basilico dedicates to Aldo Rossi's architecture, following a chronological chiasmatic path: the first subjects in the photos of the late 1980s are of projects from those years, between the 1980s and 1990s, such as the Molteni Chapel (commissioned by UniFor in '87), and the Carlo Felice theater in Genoa, and then going back to the early 2000s with photographs of the San Cataldo Cemetery (1971) and of the Gallaratese Quarter (1967-1972).  

Gabriele Basilico, an architecture student at the Milan Polytechnic in the years when Aldo Rossi held the chair of Stylistic and Distributive Characters of Buildings, in the mid-1960s, was formed in the postwar Milanese context, on the threshold of the protests of 1968, in a cultural climate marked by strong visual and intellectual energy. Although he did not attend his lectures, Basilico met Rossi's thought through his texts and disciplinary debate, recognizing his commitment to reaffirming the cultural autonomy of architecture and to restoring urban planning to the role of a critical tool and not an end in itself.

Basilico's photographs, in stark black and white, depict buildings in a way that almost reduces them to the dimension of drawings, as Pier Paolo Tamburelli writes in the essay accompanying the selection of images in the volume. “They Seem to recall Rossi's own theory, seeking to remove the buildings from their author's digressions, bringing them back from the narcissistic intimacy of Autobiografia scientifica to the militant science of Architettura della città. Here, Basilico is more Rossian than Rossi; his photographs precisely document the buildings and the cities in which they are located in their surly relationship".

All this is even more evident when referring to the most famous photographs of Aldo Rossi's buildings, those taken in color by Luigi Ghirri, as Tamburelli points out: while the Emilian photographer's language focuses more on the chromatic aspect in relation to the environment that welcomed those architectures, Basilico's syntax is instead entirely centered on the objectivity of the buildings, in an analytical, almost scientific approach.

The volume published by Humbolt also includes a textual section dedicated to some of Aldo Rossi's writings on his own work, as well as two texts that the Milanese architect wrote for two volumes of photographs by Gabriele Basilico, Gabriele Basilico. Porti di mare (1990) and Gabriele Basilico. In treno verso l’Europa (1993), which allow us to explore the reciprocal bond between the two. Rossi reads the symbolic value of the everyday infrastructures photographed by Basilico in an almost cinematic, poetic key. Terminals and stations become places of existence for workers and travelers, spaces of passage marked by encounters and solitude. In these images, Rossi recognizes fragments of industrial civilizations now in decline, yet capable of generating new urban scenarios and an unprecedented form of beauty.

Alongside this volume, it is also worth mentioning another short text written by Gabriele Basilico, architect and photographer, also for Domus, entitled Letter to an architect friend (Domus 811, January 1999), which concludes as follows: "What I have long set myself as a goal is to be able to see things free from moralism, ideology, and the latent nightmare of prejudice. Perhaps in this way, the possibility of seeing a new ‘beauty’ can arise and develop, one that does not exclude but coexists with mediocrity. [...] Perhaps then the act of photographing, understood as reading characters, will help us understand the simple or complex form of places, to grasp their similarities or differences to the point of deluding ourselves that we can possess and manipulate reality through its image and thus take possession, virtually, of space."

Opening image: Centro direzionale di Fontivegge, Perugia. Foto ©2007 Gabriele Basilico / Archivio Gabriele Basilico, Milano. Gabriele Basilico, Gabriele Basilico fotografa Aldo Rossi, Humboldt Books, Milano 2026