A Scientific Autobiography

In my fourth year of architecture, I spent one semester in Italy, at a study center in a Tuscan hill town. My classmates and I took a lot of field trips — day trips in Tuscany (San Gimignano, Siena, Pienza, Montepulciano, etc.) or longer trips to Rome and Venice — but we also had design studios and other classes. In other words, it wasn't all fun, travel and cheap wine ($1 for a bottle of red at the restaurant just up the hill!). One of the classes was a seminar in which we read Aldo Rossi's "A Scientific Autobiography," a book that has lingered in my head since. On some days we talked together inside, but on others we headed out into the courtyard or the nearby piazza, the last a particularly fitting place to discuss Rossi, an show more Italian architect known for his thoughts on memory and the city. This being 1995, Rossi was in much more favor with our professor than us students, since we preferred Tschumi, Libeskind, Hadid and other now-famous architects. But Rossi's personal and meandering book is something I found appealing — now and then. It is full of short and long paragraphs that can be detached from the text and analyzed at length, and that is how we read the book, both as a group and individually in our notebooks. It is one of those books that all architects and students of architecture should read, hopefully before they turn 30 (those who read it will know what I mean). show less