Joseph Imorde

In 1981, at the beginning of his scientific autobiography, Italian architect Aldo Rossi describes a visit to the church of Sant' Andrea in Mantua; this brief, programmatic account of his experience serves to illustrate the theme of this lecture. Rossi saw in Mantova "how a haze slowly permeated the basilica" - a fog "like the ones I liked to watch [as a child] seeping into the Galleria in Milan". Rossi saw this haze as the unexpected element that changed everything. In particular, the occurring mist made the architect more aware of the ambiguity of the Italian term "tempo" – a word that refers, of course, to both the weather and to time. Along with the experienced "temporality", in other words with the ephemeral atmospheric event, the architecture lost all its calendrical and topographical–i.e., all determinable and measurable–factors and entered, in a totally different form, into the consciousness of the one experiencing it. Now, in this memory from childhood, the monument loses its own identity and enters a personally heightened reality as atmosphere-forming, a reality that–precisely because it is far from objectifiable–in turn, exerts a history-forming impact on Rossi's recollections. The lecture will address the effects of such atmospheric temporality.
Joseph Imorde is a professor of art history at University of Siegen.

The lecture will be broadcasted live via Zoom and YouTube and available afterwards via YouTube.

Lecture series in cooperation with the Department of Art History at University of Siegen

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