Autonomous Discipline

There is a common ideology between everything we have read up to this point: "the idea that there [is] a specificity or a particular aspect of architecture which could allow it to be considered an autonomous discipline." The attempts to identify this aspect of architecture have been many and varied, and yet in my mind it remains as questionable and elusive today as it did back then. Aldo Rossi provides an interesting outlook on the subject, but his architecture, or at least the Modena cemetary, does not seem to follow his ideology on architecture as the construction of the city. Perhaps it is because we are not able to view it in context of the city, but nevertheless I think he was very successful in creating a "city for the dead." However illogical the idea of "the program of a desolate house" seems at first, it's presence is felt without eplanation or understanding. This metaphysical relationship between people and architecture and his decomposition of buildings to their essence reminds me of the ideology of Louis Kahn. Kahn was searching for the perfect expression of the same building typologies that were central to Rossi's rationalism; in both cases that which was closest to its essence; what a building "wants to be." Rossi's prioritization of form and complete disposal of detail, however, draws an enormous rift between the two comparable to their conflicting political ideologies.