Aldo Rossi – an outstanding architect and pioneering designer of the 20th century
From 1949 to 1959, Aldo Rossi (born 3 May 1931 in Milan, Italy) studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano. While still a student, he worked in the offices of Ignazio Gardella and Marco Zanuso and also wrote for the magazines "Il Contemporaneo" and "Casabella-Continuità", of which he was an editor from 1961 to 1964.
In the 1960s, Aldo Rossi carried out various building projects, such as the redevelopment of the Via Sarini district in Milan and a shopping centre in Turin, Italy, both of which reveal the reductive design principle of his architecture. After planning the 13th Milan Triennale together with Luca Meda in 1964, he published his best-known theoretical work, "L'architettura della città" (The Architecture of the City), two years later in 1966.
From the mid-1960s, Aldo Rossi was a professor at the Politecnico di Milano, and in the early 1970s, together with Gianni Braghieri, he developed the award-winning design for the San Cataldo Cemetery near Modena in Italy, which was built in 1980.
From 1972 to 1974, Aldo Rossi was a visiting professor at ETH Zurich in Switzerland. In 1983, he directed the 1st Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy. In 1987, Rossi and Umberto Barbieri set up a joint office in The Hague in the Netherlands. In 1988, he was made an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects, and in 1990 he won the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Rossi design: a strict language of primary forms and geometric patterns
As a designer, Aldo Rossi made a name for himself above all in the 1980s, when he took part in Alessi's "Tea & Coffee Piazza" project as a leading postmodern architect. After the project, he designed further products for Alessi, such as the famous La Conica (1984) and La Cupola (1989) espresso makers. Aldo Rossi also designed rugs for ARP-Studio and furniture for Molteni, Up&Up and Unifor.
Between 1990 and 1993, major exhibitions were dedicated to the architect and designer in Paris in France, Berlin in Germany, Ghent in Belgium and Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Aldo Rossi's work and buildings are regarded as poetic, as he knew how to express abstraction and reduction in a strict language of primary forms and geometric patterns. Aldo Rossi died on 4 September 1997 as a result of a car accident.
