Aldo Rossi rememberd
Born in Milan on May3,1931.He studied architecture and cinema at Milan Polytechnic. He edited the Italian magzine Casabella in the 1960s and taught architecture in Milan,Venice, Zurich, New YorkCity, and Buenos Aires, cemeting his reputation as both scholar and builder. Since 1986 he ran his practice from office in Milan and Manhatten.He died on September 6 at the age of 66 following injuries sustained in a car crash.
Car accidents figoured prominently in Aldo Rossi’s life and death.An accident in 1971 influenced his design for the Cemetery of Sancataldo in Modena,Italy. After the accident he recalled lying immobillzed in a hospital bed, painfully firming Rossi’s theory of architecture as a sum of distinct elements assembled in a rational framework. This became mass grave with a chimneylike cap- a shockingly frank assessment of the program as a city for the dead.
Rossi remained faithful to the vocabulary of forms he established at Modena, as if in their recombination he would discover something new. He brought this approach to his architecture practice, composed largely of former students working in offices around the world. For each new commission a differrent mix of collaborators was assembled. The monumental simplicity of Rossi’s designs make them at once obvious and fresh. But it is their air of familiarity that makes them, like Rossi himself, seem even-present and eternal.
Over the years, I’ve visited many of his buildings, including celebrated works like the town hall in Borgoricco,Italy, a family tomb outside Milan, and a hotel in Fukuoka,Japan. There is something so direct and powerfull yet so serene and elusive about Rossi’s buildings that when face to face with one of them, there are no words.
What did Rossi mean to architecture? I think of his own ref;ections on his buildings, his writings and evocative drawings.” While I may talk about a school, a cemetery, a theater, it is more correct to say that I talk about life, death, imagination.” he wrote. And what did architecture mean to Rossi? He answered that question, too, when he accepted the Prizker Architecture Prize in 1990.”Searching for truth in my profession, I have ended up loving architecture.Maybe it is simple but strange satifaction that makes one love his own profession, So let me call it ‘ cara architecttura’, or in English,’ dear architecture,’ or with your permission,’ darling architecture.’”
Karen Stein
