Town Hall of Muggiò, Italy, Design Sketch

Italian architect Aldo Rossi was a major figure in the Tendenza, or neo-rationalist school of architecture, in the late 1960s and 1970s. Filtered through the language and discipline of architecture, Rossi’s study of historical cities and “urban artifacts” informed remarkable designs based on primary geometric forms. Like the cube and hemisphere that populate his famous design for the Modena Cemetery, Rossi’s competition drawing for a new municipal building in the town of Muggiò, Italy, proposes a similar play of geometric solids, featuring a gridded structure that is split in two by a truncated cone. These forms refer to historical elements of the town, including the palatial blocks at the town center and a neoclassical villa in a local park. However, Rossi’s design is not reducible to a simple abstraction of existing buildings, as he understood architectural types as the embodiment of a complex network of social and political histories from his country’s past.