Word: rossi
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...awarded since 1979, has earned an unsurpassed reputation for rigor, good sense and catholic taste (the $100,000 prize is an American creation, but half of the winners have been from abroad). The 1990 Pritzker laureate, announced this week, should only redouble the prize's prestige: Italy's Aldo Rossi, 58, has inspired and influenced a generation of younger architects, despite a modest built oeuvre. Rossi's work, as the Pritzker judges declare in their citation, "is at once bold and ordinary, original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but extremely complex in content and meaning...
Like Philip Johnson, the first Pritzker winner, Rossi was born into a well- to-do family and spent a decade as an architectural chronicler before beginning to build in earnest. For most of his career, Rossi's international cult status derived mainly from his writing (The Architecture of the City, published in Italy in 1966, is a woolly but right-minded and seminal inquiry into the nature of urban spaces) and from sketchy, evocative drawings. Like Johnson, Rossi has had to live down scandalous enthusiasms. Johnson was a fascist sympathizer in the 1930s, and Rossi, whose work is sometimes reminiscent...
...there the similarities end, for Rossi is serious and original, deeply persuaded of his vision and never calculatingly fashionable. His work recalls the local vernacular (the silos, campaniles and old-fashioned factories of his native land) and the international architectural pantheon (Andrea Palladio, Etienne-Louis Boullee, Adolf Loos). Seamlessly, he combines the down-to-earth austerity of the former with the self-conscious erudition of the latter...
...Rossi has a reputation, not altogether undeserved, for rueful, chilly buildings. Until the past decade, he was widely known for a cemetery in Modena, Italy, that was started in 1971. The complex is dignified, with utterly no attempt to prettify or embellish. One of its main features, a 2,625-ft.-long, colonnaded, concrete arcade, achieves serenity by way of severity. His 1976 school in the town of Fagnano was a similarly stripped-down collection of elemental components. Yet, as if to confound those who would pigeonhole him as a weltschmerzy ascetic, Rossi took the opposite tack for a family...
...been interviewed; he has no one in mind. The process is entirely open," says Rossi...