The Obscured Original

I

Digitally archived on the official Facebook Page of Princeton University School of Architecture, this photograph of the opening reception of the Aldo Rossi show at Princeton in February 2018 captures a moment of stark theatricality created by the spatial orientations of the “protagonists” and the audience (Fig. 01).^1 On the “stage,” so to speak, major contributors to the exhibition cluster around a model—pedestaled and encased—of the renowned Italian architect’s Gallaratese Housing Quarter, one of his signature projects. Their frontal presence in the photo calls for recognition, and indeed, it is not difficult to recognize who they are—with but one exception. Who is this man, standing furthest to the left of the ensemble, alongside, from right to left, Gianni Braghieri (Rossi’s longtime collaborator), Mónica Ponce de León (Dean of the Princeton School of Architecture), Dan Sherer (exhibition curator), Yehuda Safran and Kurt W. Forster (curatorial consultants), and Peter Eisenman right next to him?

Fig. 01 Photographer unspecified, posted in the photo album “Aldo Rossi: The Architecture and Art of the Analogous City” on the Facebook Page of “Princeton University School of Architecture.” Courtesy of Princeton University School of Architecture.

While this question might be easily dismissed as being inconsequential, trivia and minutiae can afford both historical and historiographical significance. One can develop a methodology of working with incidental material by paying critical attention to anecdotal particulars, despite the terror, vertigo, and peril of “free falling into the dark tunnel of the archive” one might risk.^2 The scope of this essay is, of course, beyond the Holmesian detection of clues and details, but a microscopic observation—the attentiveness to biographical information, interpersonal relationships, marginal documents (Facebook posts, for example), minor historical contingencies, coincidences, anomalies, traces, fragile impressions, and partial witnesses—may “reveal factors previously unobserved” so that it becomes possible to “draw far wider generalizations,” as proponents of microhistory have tirelessly demonstrated.^3

II

I became acquainted with Frank Gerard Godlewski in Dan Sherer’s 2019 seminar at Princeton where he was an invited guest speaker. Godlewski was born in Montclair, New Jersey in 1959 to an upper-middle class family. In the spring of 1979, the twenty-year-old Godlewski, a junior architecture student at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, found himself in the third-year design studio led by Aldo Rossi.

Invited by John Hejduk to teach the third-year studio at Cooper, Rossi gave a studio assignment that, in some sense, echoed his own journey across the Atlantic: he asked Godlewski and his classmates to reinterpret Thomas Jefferson’s Academical Village, an architectural reincarnation of a European Enlightenment vision that would form the new American. The year 1979 saw Rossi’s election to Italy’s prestigious Accademia di San Luca, bringing him his first major official recognition as an architect.^4 His second exhibition of drawings in the United States was to happen later that year, mounted, again, by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) after his American debut in 1976.^5 In November 1979, his Teatro del Mondo, later to be regarded as one of postmodernism’s most iconic manifestations, set sail from a barge in the Fusina shipyards, floating—towed by tugboat—to a mooring near the Punta della Dogana and the church of Santa Maria della Salute in the Bacino San Marco in celebration of the Venice Biennale.^6 Just as the floating theater emerged on the water of the lagoon against the veil of the Venetian mist early that morning, one could say that the year 1979 marked the emergence of Rossi on the international stage in a similar fashion.^7

In the summer of 1979, Rossi invited two students of the studio to intern at his office in Milan at Via Maddalena 1, none other than Godlewski and another American young man by the name of Jesse Reiser. Reiser interned there for three months over the summer, but Godlewski stuck around in Rossi’s Milan studio for eight years until 1987—he managed to graduate from Cooper Union in 1982—and eventually became a close friend of Rossi’s family members and his circle. While Rossi asked Godlewski to build models, he chose Reiser to make drawings. Reiser’s job, in his own words, was “actually really sad”: “to transfer the drawing I put the film directly on the Arches paper, then used a pin to produce points, and then connected the points in pencil. There was nothing created by me. It was a transfer of an existing drawing and using the film was a practical expedient.”^8 Reiser continued,“It was not about the design of the Modena Cemetery. That had been done in 1972. . . It was part, I think, of his ambition to internationalize his project.”^9 In other words, Rossi enlisted Reiser’s labor in a transatlantic network of techniques, expertise, and personnel to reproduce his architecture that was already there, but with a new combination of colors for an American audience. If we take a closer look at Rossi’s signature of this drawing, which reads, “Scuola di Aldo Rossi; copia di Jesse Reiser,” one could argue that in the absence of an authorship of the original, a different authorship of that of the copy, or, the copyright of the copy, would surface, which was to be safeguarded by the institutionalization of a “scuola”—a “school”—whatever that means.^10

The now Princeton professor Jesse Reiser has properly documented and, to a certain degree, historicized, his experience as Rossi’s short-term intern, but that is not the case with his Cooper classmate Godlewski.^11 As we shall see, Godlewski’s stay in Milan—much more extended, engaging more intricate relationships—would complicate a number of questions concerning labor, authorship, and processes of the monetization of architectural objects.

III

& IV are in Issue 31.

An Tairan is a writer and editor currently pursuing a PhD in History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University. With a group of colleagues, he co-founded and co-edits Tangent Essays, an independent magazine about architecture based in Wuhan, China.

^1 For other photographs of the series of events surrounding the 2018 Rossi show at Princeton School of Architecture, see: https://www.facebook.com/pg/PrincetonSoA/photos/?tab=album&alid=815448635324883&ref=page_internal. [link broken]
^2 I took this expression from Beatriz Colomina, who used it to animate the terror of the excessive documents in Alison and Peter Smithson’s archive as it was filled with a myriad of mundane things from memos of what they ate in the office to clothes they planned to take on a particular trip. See Beatriz Colomina, “Couplings,” in Max Risselada (ed.), Alison & Peter Smithson: A Critical Anthology (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2011), 355.
^3 Giovanni Levi, “On Microhistory,” in Peter Burke (ed.), New Perspectives on Historical Writing (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1992), 97.
^4 Diane Ghirardo, Aldo Rossi and the Spirit of Architecture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 21. For a biographical sketch of Rossi’s life, see the first chapter of this monographic work, “A Brief Biography.”
^5 See the exhibition catalog produced by the IAUS in Peter Eisenman and Kenneth Frampton (ed.), Aldo Rossi in America, 1976 to 1979 (New York: Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, 1979). The IAUS facilitated the first two exhibitions of Rossi’s drawings in the US, the first from March 25 to April 14, 1976 at the Institute, followed by the second one from September 19 to October 30, 1979 at the Max Protech Gallery, New York.
^6 Rossi’s floating theater, paying homage to the theater tradition of sixteenth-century Venice, set out on its voyage from the Fusina shipyard to the Bacino before dawn on November 11, 1979, destined to float for a few months on the waters of the lagoon. For the design of Teatro del mondo, see also Manlio Brusatin and Alberto Prandi (eds.), Aldo Rossi: Teatro del mondo (Venezia: Cluva, 1982); Gianni Braghieri, “1979. Teatro del Mundo,” in Aldo Rossi (Barcelona: GG, Estudio paperback, 1986), 144-151; Alberto Ferlenga, “Teatro del Mondo a Venezia, 1979,” Aldo Rossi. Architettute, 1959-1987 (Milan: Electa, 1987), 153-162; For Rossi and theatre in Venice in general, see Gino Malacarne and Patrizia Montini Zimolo (eds.), Aldo Rossi e Venezia: il teatro e la città (Unicopli, 2002).
^7 Rossi’s international fame grew through the 1970s and 80s as he traveled the globe; among many of his travels, the multiple American sojourns were especially transformative as he taught in various institutions and established relationship with the IUAS. As Jesse Reiser put it, “(In 1979) It was Rossi’s second trip to America at that time, and travel abroad was still a big deal. To be international was more significant for architects then than it is today. I think Rossi was also trying to find an analogous architecture in America, to extend his own project.” Jesse Reiser, “Jesse Reiser on Aldo Rossi (2017),” in Projects and Their Consequences: Reiser+Umemoto (Princeton University Press, 2019), 61-63. However, it should be mentioned that this was not Rossi’s second trip to America. He visited the US first in 1976 and then taught in 1977 and 1979 as visiting Professor at Cornell and Cooper. See Aldo Rossi, I Quaderni Azzurri, ed. Francesco Dal Co (J. Paul Getty Museum Publication and Electa,
^8 Ibid., 62.
^9 Ibid., 62.
^10 On Rossi’s unusual signature for this drawing, Sylvia Lavin offers a slightly different argument, as she poignantly points out, “[r]ather than reinforce the postmodern claim that drawings are autonomous and the site of authorship, even the signature on this object, more like a document in its apparent impersonality, ties the drawing not to authorship but to the logistics of architectural command and the control required to hold institutions, producers, designs, buildings, and drawings together.” Sylvia Lavin, “Free Hands and Airbrushes,” in Architecture Itself and Other Postmodernization Effects (CCA/Spector Books, 2020), 270.
^11 Jesse Reiser published his essay “Jesse Reiser on Aldo Rossi” in his 2019 book Projects and Their Consequences: Reiser+Umemoto, a piece that first appeared on the website drawingmatter in 2017.