Tracing Rossi

Tracing Rossi reinterprets architect Aldo Rossi’s architectural and urban ideas through a practice of what McEwan calls “close-drawing.” Rossi, one of Italy’s foremost twentieth-century architects, introduced compelling ideas on the city as the locus of collective memory, the permanence of the city-territory, and the relationship between architecture and nature. His neglected notion of analogical cities challenged utilitarian approaches to urbanism with open ended, imaginative, “analogical thinking” about cities. Tracing Rossi revisits these aspects, investigating their continuing significance, and transforming Rossi’s ideas in light of contemporary challenges, particularly on unruly urbanisation and the spatial aspects of the Anthropocene – the current era where human activity significantly influences climate change and resource depletion.

The exhibition is part of a wider critical project developed in McEwan’s book Analogical City, the first detailed study of Rossi and the analogical city. McEwan argues that the analogical city is poetic and political: it always refers beyond itself towards a collective and critical project of the city, and yet it invites a series of formal, spatial, and graphic operations comprising erasure and negation, presence and absence, followed by overdrawing, substitution, and remontage. Tracing Rossi advances Rossi’s legacy and engages his ideas as critical tools for addressing pressing challenges through architectural imagination.

Exhibition opening and book launch of Analogical City

Friday 18 April 2025

18:00–20:00

Stallan-Brand Architecture + Design

80 Nicholson Street

Glasgow G5 9ER

Exhibition continues

Friday 18 April–Friday 23 May 2025

Acknowledgment

Presented with the support of Stallan-Brand Architecture + Design,

with special thanks to Paul Stallan and Solveig Einarsdottir.

Supported by

Northumbria University Design Research Group

punctum books

Bio

Cameron McEwan is associate professor of architecture at Northumbria School of Architecture and director of the AE Foundation. Cameron’s research focuses on the relationship between architectural typology, representation, and subjectivity to engage critical approaches addressing the urban/Anthropocene condition. He has presented and exhibited work at the Architectural Association London, Cooper Union New York, TU Graz, and the Venice Architecture Biennale. His writing appears in Architecture and Culture, arq, Drawing On, JAE, MONU, and elsewhere. Recent projects include a forthcoming special issue of The Journal of Architecture on urban peripheries and the Anthropocene, and his book Analogical City, published by punctum in 2024.