Massimo Scolari, 1998 [1973]:

"Usually anything that regresses, in this case Italian architecture, implies the logic of progress in a state of pause, the formulation, sometimes purely negative, of a new order of theoretical values and principles. This pause or change of mind, which is often and improperly singled out as the locus of the avant-garde, may present two different and contrasting paths of development: the utopia of the avantgarde, and the refounding of the discipline." [p. 128]

"This second sort of critical attitude, which in its analysis is creating the new architecture, opts not for invention or the great idea, but rather moves patiently and perhaps more surely through a process of clarification. Like every truly scientific attitude, this position, which for the sake of brevity we shall call the ‘Tendenza,' does not discover new truths, but aims at the elimination of errors in a process of knowledge centered on historical and formal analysis, on the study of the city as a product, and on the characteristics that lead a certain kind of architecture to be projected onto a certain part of society.

For the Tendenza, architecture is a cognitive process that in and of itself, in the acknowledgment of its own autonomy, is today necessitating a refounding of the discipline; that refuses interdisciplinary solutions to its own crisis; that does not pursue and immerse itself in political, economic, social, and technological events only to mask its own creative and formal sterility, but rather desires to understand them so as to be able to intervene in them with lucidity - not to determine them, but not to be subordinate to them either." [p. 131-132]

"The critical establishment within architecture has told us that we have entered the era of ‘post-modernism.' The tone with which this news is delivered is invariably one of relief, similar to that which accompanies the advice that one is no longer an adolescent. Two indices of this supposed change are the quite different manifestations of the ‘Architettura Razionale' exhibition at the Milan Triennale of 1973, and the ‘Ecole Des Beaux Arts' exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art in 1975. The former, going on the assumption that modern architecture was an outmoded functionalism, declared EISENMAN, Peter. Post-Functionalism [1976]. In: HAYS, K. Michael (Ed.). Oppositions reader: selected readings from a journal for ideas and criticism in architecture, 1973-1984. Nova York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1998. p. 9-12.that architecture can be generated only through a return to itself as an autonomous or pure discipline. The latter, seeing modern architecture as an obsessional formalism, made itself into an implicit statement that the future lies paradoxically in the past, within the peculiar response to function that characterized the nineteenth century's eclectic command of historical styles." [p. 9]

"My only experience with film occurred at the 1973 Triennale in Milan. The film had the title of Loos's beautiful essay on architecture, ‘Ornament and Crime,' and it was a collage of architectural works and pieces of different films which tried to introduce the discourse of architecture into life and at the same time view it as a background for human events. From cities and palaces we passed to excerpts from [Luchino] Visconti, [Federico] Fellini, and other directors. Venice, and the problem of the historical urban center, acquired further significance as a background to the impossible love described by Visconti in Il Senso. l recall a white, desperate Trieste which only the story of Italo Svevo's Senility made clear, especially its architectural context. We later shot the final part of the film on the outskirts of Milan at dawn. I truly believe that I had gone beyond architecture, or at least explained it better. The problem of technique also vanished, and now I think that the realization of this film may be the continuation of so many things I am seeking in architecture." [p. 72-74]

"The Fifteenth Milan Triennale, in 1973, included an architecture section set up by Rossi and called ‘Architettura Razionale.' The exhibition catalog contained an introduction by Rossi and a series of texts selected to support Rossi's proposition: a rather long 1958 essay by his teacher Ernest Nathan Rogers (whose Torre Velasca had ceased to be controversial), a text by the Swiss architect Hans Schmidt (undated), and writings by Mosei Ginzburg (1926), Adolf Loos (1910 and 1912), and Jacobus Johannes Peter Oud (1927). But Rossi accorded first place to an excerpt from Adolf Behne's book Der moderne Zweckbau [The Functional Modern Building]. [...]" [p. 211]

"Rossi did not wish to renounce the classical modernism of the 1920s or to imply that the revival of historical forms would create a theatrical realm for human activity; rather, he wanted to bring about a loosening of the strictures imposed by functionalism by encouraging a reexamination of the original intentions of classical modernism. The programmatic definition of Rationalism seemed to guarantee this for him. In a way, Rossi wanted to get back to modernism - all the way back to its origins. Yet his own development took him farther and farther away from the modernist tradition and into a new territory unknown to modernism." [p. 211]

"Nothing could be further from the Populist programme, at least at its origins, than the Italian Neo-Rationalist movement, the so-called ‘Tendenza', which was clearly an attempt to save both architecture and the city from being overrun by the all-pervasive forces of megalopolitan consumerism.

This return to the ‘limits' of architecture was initiated by the publication of two singularly seminal texts, Aldo Rossi's L'architettura della città (1966) and Giorgio Grassi's La costruzione logica dell'architettura (1967). The first stressed the part to be played by established building types in determining the morphological structure of urban form as it develops in time; the second attempted to formulate the necessary compositional or combinatorial rules for architecture - the intrinsic logic by which Grassi himself had arrived at his own highly restrained expression. While insisting that everyday needs must be met, both men rejected the principle by which form is supposed to follow function - ergonomics - and asserted instead the relative autonomy of architectural order. [...]" [p. 294]

"Other Italians who made important contributions to the Tendenza were Vittorio Gregotti, whose book Il territorio dell'architettura (1966) had an extensive influence, and Enzo Bonfanti, who with Massico Scolari edited the Neo-Rationalist magazine Contraspazio [sic] in the second half of the 1960s. Finally credit has to be accorded to Manfredo Tafuri, whose writings were a major influence on the movement, and to Franco Purini and Laura Thermes, whose theoretical projects explored the potential range of the Neo-Rationalist syntax. Paradoxically, the Tendenza has realized very little in Italy, though it has had an impact on Italian city-planning and the historic preservation of urban centres, the classic example being Cervellati and Scannarini's analytical study of Bologna, which influenced the development of that city throughout the 1970s" [p. 295]

"In the mid-1970s the vanguards of American and Italian architecture, more specifically New York and Venice, experienced a consequential attraction for each other. Two seminal publications had appeared in 1966 - Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture and Aldo Rossi's L'architettura della città. At the time these were unrelated events; that postmodernism had its major heralds in America and Italy was largely a function of different historical conditions. More anticipatory of the transatlantic relationship to occur were Peter Eisenman's pilgrimages to Terragni's buildings in Como in the early 1960s, accompanied by Colin Rowe in the role of Virgil. The most ambiguous of the Italian rationalists thus entered into the genealogy of the New York Five, formed around Eisenman in 1969. Still, in 1973, when Rossi, in charge of the international architecture section at the XV Milan Triennale, included the mannered late modernism of the Five in an exhibition entitled Architettura razionale, the case for a worldwide tendenza seemed superficial, if not contradictory." [p. 57]

"Surely the architects assembled in the fifteenth Triennale of Milan, 1973, under the formula ‘Rational Architecture,' were not the only ones pursuing an autonomous architecture made out of architecture's own purified elements and its elements only. But to construct out of that gathering a new international program of architectural research - the ‘Tendenza,' in Massimo Scolari's resonant appellation - put the theoretical fine point on a contradiction that was paramount in the architecture theory of the 1970s: the contradiction between the universality of architecture's historical contingency and the universality of its autonomy. [...]" [p. 124]

"As is well known, the success of Italian architecture internationally - especially in the United States - coincided with two major ‘museum' events: the Fifteenth Triennale in Milan, curated by Aldo Rossi in 1973, and the Museum of Modern Art exhibition ‘Italy: The New Domestic Landscape,' curated by Emilio Ambasz in 1972. In the first, Rossi extended the project of autonomy to other international groups and movements that did not share his own political motivations. In the second, Ambasz celebrated the innovative aesthetic style of ‘radical architecture' rather than its political background. [...]

It is thus ironic that these two major exhibitions, the Triennale and the MoMA show, were internationally received as the seminal events of, respectively, ‘autonomous architecture' and ‘radical architecture.' Rather than inaugurating new theoretical positions, in fact, these events coincided with the very end of the two movements in Italy. By the beginning of the 1970s the theories that were initially conceived as contributions to the political and social struggles of the city became mired in the discourse of academia and the space of exhibitions, where critics and curators adapted them to the cultural fashion of the moment. [...]" [p. 81-82]

"In the introduction, Rossi clearly points to Schmidt and to a socialist definition of architectural type, a definition that is not aesthetic, but social. Rossi presents type - or rational form - neither as archetype nor as lasting architectural form, but as the product of collective work. And as such, it is beyond any aesthetic criticism, for example, of its monotonous appearance. There and in other essays written in the first half of the 1970s, Rossi forthrightly adopts one of Hans Schmidt's arguments that repeatedly emphasizes that monotony and monumentality in architecture do not call for aesthetic debates, but social debates. In the introduction to the Triennale catalog, it is to the ‘socialist perspective' that Rossi declares his allegiance, and not to timeless, abstract laws of form, which he elsewhere dismisses as schematism." [p. 51]

"With the proverbial stance of a manifesto, Massimo Scolari firstly defines Tendenza as a negation of something else. It opposes the bureaucracy of functionalism and, more significantly, the ‘escapisms' of the new avant-gardes clustered in Florence around names like Archizoom, and Superstudio. This disapproval is then extended onto a previous index sorted by Constantino Dardi that does not spare even a doyen of Italian architecture - Giovanni Michelucci - and goes on to condemn the pop architecture of Archigram, the geometrisms of Robert Venturi, the associations of Moshe Safdie, the huts of Hans Scharoun, and so forth. To this, Scolari counterposes the exemplary standing of Aldo Rossi [...] rooted in a lineage that goes back to Ernesto Nathan Rogers and his direction of Casabella-continuità. Finally he outlines, in abbreviated manner, fundamental tropes claimed by Tendenza such as monument, type, and city in order to produce an architectural theory based on ‘logically interconnected principles.'

This structure of contents proceeds from historical context to theoretical enunciation and the compliance of this protocol grants the text its seminal status, a kind of Magna Carta of Tendenza. Nevertheless, according to Manfredo Tafuri, Scolari would ater disavow it as a ‘Dadaist gesture.' These tactics of rebuttal also indicate how the word itself became an intellectual charade to trigger a much wider debate over what architecture should really mean. Tendenza thus confirms the dictum of yet another American writer, William Burroughs, that ‘language is a virus.' This dissemination must be traced back to Aldo Rossi as part of a lexicon he was able to introduce in the architectural jargon of that period. [...]"

"This same strategy would be repeated and broadened, only two years later, in another context. We are referring to the Rational Architecture exhibition, organized by Léon Krier in London, in 1975. The resumption of the Italian exhibition in a London context was certainly not for disinterested motives; through it, the intent was to affirm the existence of a movement. [...] In this exhibition, therefore, the following were presented as representatives of one single movement: Aymonino, Rossi, Scolari, Stirling, Ungers, Koolhaas, Zenghelis, Kleihues, Huet, Montes, Grassi, Gregotti, Léon Krier, Rob Krier, Perez de Arce, Portzamparc and Manuel Solà-Morales, among others.

In the text he wrote for the exhibition catalog, Léon Krier sought to explain the criteria for the inclusion of new architects in the exhibition and the exclusion of others. This entailed selecting designs representative of a ‘new architectural movement, a new critical approach with respect to the renewal of the European City' [...]. For this reason, architects such as Venturi and the New York Five were excluded who, according to the curator, would ‘confuse the major themes heralded by Rational Architecture' [...]. Regarding the architectural designs presented in the exhibition, Krier said that they reflected the same ‘thoughts about the city, its use and social content' as well as a common concern for the ‘re-creation of the public space' [...]. [...]" [p. 80-81]

"The theses of La Tendenza impacted pedagogical discourse in Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Germany and the United States, amongst other countries, until at least the mid-1980s. Its pedagogical program fostered collective research on the structural constancies and close dialogue between the architectures of the city and the building; theoretical notions of urban morphology and building typology, ideas about analogical form and urban locus, and the analytic and ordered approach to formal composition all characterized its methodology. It further aimed at reconstructing the "discipline" of architecture, not least under the guidance of Manfredo Tafuri's reevaluation of the function of history in architecture in relation to the conditions of labor at the Istituto di Storia dell'Architettura in Venice."