Aldo Rossi

Background

Aldo Rossi was born in Milan in 1931 and died there in 1997, after a car accident. He studied architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, graduating in 1958 under Piero Portaluppi, according to Wikipedia. His career began in the studios of Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso; Molteni&C says he started working with both after graduating, while Wikipedia dates the Gardella job to 1956.

Signature Style

Wikipedia calls him one of the leading proponents of postmodernism and traces his early work to Italian modernism of the 1920s, to Adolf Loos and to the paintings of Giorgio de Chirico. In his book The Architecture of the City (1966) he argues that a city is built over time and remembers its past through its monuments. The same site says the independence of his buildings carries over into the "micro-architectures" of the objects he designed.

Notable Works

• Gallaratese housing complex in Milan, completed in 1969 according to Molteni&C
• San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, from the 1971 competition
• Teatro del Mondo, the floating theatre for the 1980 Venice Biennale
• Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa and the reconstruction of La Fenice in Venice
• For Molteni&C: the Piroscafo single unit (with Luca Meda) and the Carteggio single unit; Wikipedia adds the Teatro chair (1983, with Meda) and the Milan chair (1987)

Legacy

He won the Pritzker Prize in 1990, the first Italian to do so according to Wikipedia, and the AIA's Thomas Jefferson Medal in 1991. In 1999 the architecture faculty that the University of Bologna runs in Cesena took his name, and the MAXXI museum in Rome staged a retrospective of his work in 2021.