At The Heart Of His Work

Late Italian architect Aldo Rossi created buildings of poetry before his accidental death

The architecture of Aldo Rossi is inherently dramatic, so it's fitting that one of Rossi's best-loved works is a floating theatre which the Italian architect designed for the 1979 Venice Biennale. The architect, who died after a car accident near his northern Italian home in the late summer of 1997, once described his 250-seat Venetian theatre project, in his typically poetic manner, as "a place where architecture ended and the world of the imagination began."
Following Rossi's untimely passing, an American colleague, William Higgins, noted that "like his buildings, Rossi was at once serious and whimsical, magisterial and accessible, popular and retiring. Although an influential teacher and theoretician, he was at heart an artist and a visual poet, and that is the way he designed his buildings."
Although he began his career as modernism was reaching its zenith in Italy and around the world, Rossi was more of a traditionalist, inspired by the classical building forms of his native northern Italy. He refined his work by consciously returning to a select few number of forms, which included the cone, the chimney, the silo, the gable wall and the galleria. Rossi's disapproval of the limiting functional approach of modernism was evident in his 1966 book, L'Architettura della citta, which became an influential post-modern blueprint for urban planning.
In 1990, Rossi became the first Italian architect to receive the prestigious Pritzker Prize, generally acknowledged today as the top award for architecture worldwide. (Renzo Piano became the second Italian architect to receive the award in 1998.) In noting Rossi's achievements, the Pritzker Prize jury commented that "Rossi has been able to follow the lessons of classical architecture without copying them; his buildings carry echoes from the past in their use of forms that have a universal, haunting quality. His work is at once bold and ordinary, original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but extremely complex in content and meaning."
Rossi was born in Milan in 1931. His family owned a bicycle manufacturing business. The future architect was educated in schools at Lake Como and Lecco before earning his degree from the Politecnico di Milano in 1959. His early 1970s design of the Gallaratese housing complex just outside the city of his birth was an indication of the exceptional work which would follow. Rossi's other notable Italian projects include the Turin headquarters for the GFT fashion house, the Centro Torri shopping centre at Parma and the Palazzo Regionale civic centre in Perugia. Internationally, he designed apartment buildings in Berlin, residences in The Hague and offices in the Canary Wharf district of London.
In the United States, Rossi was well-received in respected academic circles and his built work includes housing in Pennsylvania and a monumental arch in Galveston, Texas. One of his last projects was an addition to the Broadway headquarters of an educational publisher in New York City. For this project, Rossi created a main façade of steel, stone and terra cotta which reflected the scale and formal qualities of adjacent buildings. In September, 1996, New York Times writer Paul Goldberger called Rossi's design "brilliantly inventive," adding that it was "no exaggeration to say that this is one of the most distinguished pieces of new architecture to be proposed for any New York City historic district in the last generation."
Italian photographer Luigi Ghirri was captivated by Rossi's architectural work in Italy's Po Valley and Ghirri's images of Rossi's buildings became the basis on an exhibition at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) in Montreal in 1996. "Rossi's architecture evokes for me the feeling of the miraculous," Ghirri said. "No matter where one stands or under what light one sees it, it becomes like the spreading and multiplication of an echo, reverberating between memory and invention." The CCA's collection of drawings by the master draftsman Rossi was recently enhanced and the new acquisitions are featured in the centre's current exhibition, Out of the Box, which continues to September 6.
Rossi's capacity to provoke profound thought in others through his buildings is perhaps best explained by American architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable, who once noted that Rossi is "a poet who happens to be an architect."

Publication Date: 2004-01-18
Story Location: http://tandemnews.com/viewstory.php?storyid=3538