Aldo Rossi: I Quaderni azzurri

The Italian architect and theorist Aldo Rossi (1931-1997) gained international renown for his imaginative and starkly beautiful designs featuring simple forms such as cones, cylinders, prisms, and cubes. Among his most famous projects are the cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena; the Gallaratese residential complex in Milan; the Hotel Il Palazzo in Fukuoka, Japan; and Il Teatro del Mondo, a temporary floating theater created in 1979 for the Venice Bienniale. This limited, boxed-set edition contains facsimiles of Rossi's notebooks for the years 1968 to 1986. Their pages are filled with Rossi's thoughts on architectural theory and history, his musings on progress, cities, and museums, and the impressions he recorded during his extensive travels. Handwritten in Italian and illustrated with Rossi's superb pastel and watercolor sketches, these literate and visually stunning notebooks display the genius of an architect and theorist who was, at heart, a poet of the visible.