Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi – an exceptional architect and trend-setting designer of the 20^th century

Aldo Rossi (May 3, 1931 - September 4, 1997) was an Italian architect and designer who accomplished the unusual feat of achieving international recognition in three distinct areas: theory, drawing, and architecture. Rossi was born in Milan, Italy. He graduated in architecture in 1959 from the Politecnico di Milano.

His earliest works of the 1960s were mostly theoretical and displayed a simultaneous influence of 1920s Italian modernism (see Giuseppe Terragni), classicist influences of Viennese architect Adolf Loos, and the reflections of the painter Giorgio De Chirico.

In the middle of the 60s Aldo Rossi became teacher at the University of Milan and he developed the awarded design of the San Cataldo cemetery in Modena together with Gianni Braghieri in the beginning of the 1970s, which was built in 1980.
Aldo Rossi taught as guest professor at the ETH in Zurich from 1972 to 1974. He led the first architecture biennial in Venice in 1983. Rossi founded this office together with Umberto Barbieri in Den Haag in 1987. He was honourable member of the American Institute of Architects in 1988 and he won the Printzker Price for architecture in 1990.

Rossi design: a powerful language of original shapes and geometrical patterns

Also Rossi became famous as a designer in the 1980s, when he participated at the Alessi Project “Tea & Coffee Piazza” as leading architect of postmodern art. After finalizing the project, he designed further products for Alessi, like the famous espresso flasks La Conica (1984) and La Cupola (1989). Furthermore Aldo Rossi designed carpets for ARP Studio and furniture for Molteni, Up&Up and Unifor.

The architect and designer was honoured with dedicated exhibitions in Paris, Berlin, Gent and Amsterdam from 1990 to 1993. Aldo Rossi’s works and constructions are considered to be poetical, since he knew how to express abstraction and reduction in a strict language of original shapes and geometrical patterns. Aldo Rossi passed by after a traffic accident on the 4^th of September of 1997.