Il caso "Rassegna". L'anomalia della regola

In the crowded panorama of Italian architecture magazines of the 1980s and 1990s, among the most authoritative at an international level, the twenty-year trajectory of ‘Rassegna’ is completely autonomous with respect to every other previous and subsequent title. The apparent heterogeneity of the titles traces between 1979 and 1999 an argumentative, geographic and scalar itinerary from ‘Small Objects’ to ‘Big Machines’, which builds its own logos in Gregotti's incessant activity of ‘fabricating 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 ‘Review’ of disciplinary themes seems to reinforce the monographic principle of the ‘Modern Construction’ experiment, 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 belonging of each topic 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 modern design culture resolved in its own incompleteness. The 77 idiosyncratic fragments of the magazine, itself ‘interrupted’, restore the breadth of this observatory contended between rule and exception, between principle and its contradiction, between assertion and short circuit: volumes 5 and 12 are themselves dedicated to the world of architecture magazines. These splinters of archaeology of Modern architectural knowledge constitute in themselves a specific chapter among disciplinary journals, for demonstrating the critical and argumentative extension of design culture that they can still convey. ‘Recinti’, the first issue, is its paradigm and ideological manifesto: it expresses the need to draw the boundaries of the architecture of the environment through “the faculty of choice and judgement”. The penultimate issue, ‘Arcipelago Europa’, is entrusted with the role of ideally concluding the experiment by producing an articulated Atlas that measures the depth of the crisis in contemporary architecture, calling together the morphological-historical heritage that still constitutes its intrinsic identity and future foundation. Perhaps the ‘quantum’ essence of ‘Rassegna’, of its transmuting visionary, oneiric, paradigmatic and culturalist figure, lies in having attempted to re-establish the balance between means and ends of architecture through the long-lasting dimension of project theory and its multiple materials. It presents itself as the last creative manifesto of a coherent idea of disciplinary culture based on the anomaly of the rule: Warburgian ‘anxious memory, transformed into knowledge’.