In 1980, Carlo Aymonino set his fourth-year students at IUAV Venice a strange assignment. He gave them his own work — a psychiatric hospital at Mirano, a civic centre at Pesaro, an office complex for Florence — three commissions across fifteen years that were secretly the same building, the same plan reappearing under different names. He called the habit his fissazione architettonica. On better days, continuità dell’immaginazione.
Then he asked: does it hold? Pick it up. Put it in Reggio Emilia. Put it in Mesagne, in Brindisi. Put it on the Giudecca, where it has to meet the lagoon. One group refused a site altogether and built it nowhere — the sheet reads localizzazione: nessuna, modello astratto.
And then — this is the part that makes the book unusual — draw it properly. Not a scheme. Elevations at 1:50. Façade panel details. Joints at 1:20. The complaint in the preface is that architecture schools teach students to imagine a building and never teach them to order one into existence.
Aymonino closes his account of a five-year project with one line: and I still haven’t been paid.
Modello, prototipo, soluzione architettonica — Aymonino, Lamanna, Pittaluga. CLUVA Università, Venezia, 1982. 127 illustrations. Out of print, and still the most honest thing written about what a studio is for.
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