Alberto Ferlenga curates major exhibition at the MAXXI: Aldo Rossi. The Architect and the Cities.

The MAXXI museum will open on December 17, 2020, a major exhibition of the influential Italian architect and Pritzker Price laureate Aldo Rossi. The exhibition, which was developed in collaboration with Fondazione Aldo Rossi, exhibits more than 800 letters, drawings, paintings, sketches, photographs, models, and other documents that provide the necessary context to understand Rossi’s contribution to architecture, architectural theory, and design, as well as his very personal interests in theatre and teaching.

Portrait of Italian architect Aldo Rossi - Courtesy of Aldo Rossi Foundation

MAXXI museum describes the exhibition as one that: “offers an opportunity to not only gather extraordinary materials, spread across numerous archives and private collections around the world, but also to reflect on the specific features characteristic to Italian architecture from the second half of the twentieth century. This is an architecture that has been able to anticipate and meet the needs of a wider world, and comes on the recent fortune of an Italian architect and intellectual difficult to fit into the stereotypical schemas of a rapidly evolving profession, an inexhaustible bearer of suggestions and ideas.”

The exhibition brings several models of Rossi’s projects, including that of his influential Theatre of the World; a project that Rossi made for the 1979 Venice Biennale and centered around the idea of floating theaters reminiscent of 18th century carnivals. To no surprise, the exhibition also includes an extensive collection of architectural drawings, sketches and paintings; as Aldo Rossi, in addition to being an extraordinary thinker and architect, was an accomplished drawer and painter. Aldo Rossi’s graphical work is appreciated not just as a by product of how he communicated his architectural vision, but as works of genuine beauty.

Aldo Rossi. The Architect and the Cities will be opened until August 29, 2021.