Architecture Research Forum:”Architectures of Nothing: Aldo Rossi & Raymond Roussel”, Victoria Watson, Thursday October 4, 13:00-14:00, Erskine Room, 5th Floor

When: 13:00-14:00, Thursday 4th Of October

Where: Erskine Room (M523), 5th Floor, Marylebone Campus

At the 2018 EAHN conference in Tallinn I gave a paper under the session theme of Architecture’s Return to Surrealism. The session asked how the reanimation of surrealism in the work of architects active in the 1970s and ‘80s – at the ‘tangled, asynchronous juncture of the modern and the postmodern,’ – allowed architecture to ‘formulate a critical project in reaction to the neoliberal economy that was producing its own dreams, needs and desires.’ Based on my conference paper, this presentation looks at Aldo Rossi and the connection to surrealism in his work through the influence of the writer Raymond Roussel. I argue that Rossi used Roussel to make memory an active ingredient in the architectural imagination, hence the reference to surrealism within the formulation of architectural projects after modernism.

Victoria Watson teaches in the School of Architecture + Cities and practices as Doctor Watson Architects.

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