You are here : Home> Designers > Aldo Rossi

Aldo Rossi



Designers

Aldo Rossi was an Italian architect and designer who accomplished the unusual feat of achieving international recognition in four distinct areas: theory, drawing, architecture and product design. Rossi was born in Milan, Italy. In 1949 he started studying architecture at the Milan Polytechnic where he graduated in 1959. Already in 1955 he started writing for the Casabella magazine, where he became editor between 1959 and 1964. 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. A trip to the Soviet Union to study Stalinist architecture also left a marked impression.In his writings Rossi criticized the lack of understanding of the city in current architectural practice. He argued that a city must be studied and valued as something constructed over time; of particular interest are urban artifacts that withstand the passage of time. Rossi held that the city remembers its past (our "collective memory"), and that we use that memory through monuments; that is, monuments give structure to the city.He became extremely influential in the late 1970s and 1980s as his body of built work expanded and for his theories promoted in his books The Architecture of the City (L'Architettura della Città, 1966) and A Scientific Autobiography (Autobiografia scientifica, 1981). Aldo Rossi died in a car accident in September 1997 in Milan.


Products