Aldo Rossi’s Primaeval Drawing

A hermetic, “elemental” drawing of Aldo Rossi is the point of departure of an exploration throughout the meanders of theory of architecture, going back to the end of the XVII century and forward to the end of XX century. Along the way, this paper highlights how indiscriminate subsumption of scientific thought’s logics within architectural debate has destroyed its mythopoetic and rhetorical tissue, causing irredeemable aporias, due to architecture’s irreducibility to the logics of analytical and deductive procedures. At the end of the journey, we will discover that nearly all that happened in architecture from the middle of the XVIIIth century, and is still happening today, had already been predicted with uncanny prescience by Giovanni Battista Piranesi in his Parere sull’architettura.