The Poet Who Happened to be an Architect

In 1971, Italian architect, product designer and urban theorist Aldo Rossi experienced a serious car accident, just outside Milan, which left him critically injured and hospitalised for weeks, and profoundly influenced his entire design philosophy. During his recovery, Rossi looked down at his bleeding, shattered body, and a weird sense of estrangement and disorientation started to creep over him. He felt like a visitor inside his own skin. Unattached. Cut adrift. Less a person and more like a collection of memories inside a walking thing.

When he got out of hospital, Rossi channelled this existential queasiness into a groundbreaking new project: San Cataldo Cemetery (1971). Co-designed with artist and architect Gianni Braghieri, it would become one of Rossi's most haunting and elusive works – his magnum opus – and one of the buildings that kicked off the 1970s postmodernist movement.

San Cataldo is deliberately austere. Almost spookily so. The cemetery is laid out like a rectangular grid with a walled enclosure arranged around primary axial paths, echoing the classic layout of Roman towns, or Renaissance urban planning. It's also attached to an actual 19th-century cemetery – sort of a hat-on-a-hat situation – creating this weird dialogue between the buildings of the present and the bones of the past.

In the centre of San Cataldo lies The Ossuary Cube: a giant, skeletal, pinkish-red block, windowless and empty, which Rossi deliberately left unfinished. And positioned right in front of the Ossuary, surrounded by planar emptiness on all sides, perched on the edge of a lawn, and with nothing else to stare at, is a solitary park bench. As incongruous as a candle in a carpark. It's a detail that almost makes you smile: Rossi knew any occupant of the bench would have nothing to do but sit and gaze up at the cube, confronting the unresolved spectre of their own mortality.

More than most architects, when you look at an Aldo Rossi building, the building looks back.

"The question of the fragment in architecture is very important," he wrote, "since it may be that only ruins can express a fact completely. I am thinking of a unity, or a system, made solely by reassembled fragments."

If Rossi had been a musician, he’d have written a song. If he’d been a painter, he would have tried to get his pain down on canvas. But he was an architect, so he built a cemetery.

It's probably best to think of San Cataldo as an architectural response to a near-death experience. If Rossi had been a musician, he'd have written a song. If he'd been a painter, he would have tried to get his pain down on canvas. But he was an architect, so he built a cemetery. What he called a "city of the dead". One that would catapult him onto architecture's international stage.

Of course, despite being one of the pin-up boys for postmodernism, Rossi had a shaky relationship with the movement in general.

"I cannot be Postmodern," he once declared, "as I have never been Modern."

Well, touché.

In 1990, Rossi became the first Italian to win the prestigious Pritzker Architecture Prize, and probably the best definition of him – still – comes from Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural critic and Pritzker juror, who famously described him as "a poet who happens to be an architect."

Rossi himself would die just seven years later. Ironically, in a car accident.

But to work out what Rossi actually was, and why he's so hard to categorise, we need to go back, way back, right to the beginning.

Aldo Rossi was born in Milan, Italy, in 1931. As a young man, he attended architecture school at the Politecnico di Milano, studying under renowned rationalist Piero Portaluppi (the guy responsible for nearly every significant modern building in the city). In the 1950s, Rossi became an architecture critic for several magazines, including Casabella-Continuità and Società, which put him squarely on the frontlines of the most pressing and provocative design question of the day: what comes after modernism?

At the time, nobody really knew the answer to that question, but Rossi felt instinctively that modernism's emphasis on function, minimalism and universal forms sold the universe short. Le Corbusier and van der Rohe, while obviously very talented, were missing ingredients that were, in Rossi's mind, crucial for good architecture and meaningful urban design. More than anything else, they'd forgotten the importance of memory.

For Rossi, cities were basically receptacles for our collective memory, anchored by monuments and buildings that withstood the grinding passage of time. "One cannot make architecture without studying the condition of life in the city," he said. And when you start looking at architecture in those terms, you realise that buildings can never be boiled down to purely rational or technical ideas. Like the modernists were trying to do. No matter how hard we struggle towards the New, everything we design, everything we make, is tethered to the Now and Then. To history and remembrance, context and culture.

It's this philosophy that gives Rossi's postmodernism its unique flavour (some would say 'acquired taste'). While other Postmodernists, like Ettore Sottsass, were out there experimenting with visual irony and whacky colours – gleefully giving Modernism the middle finger – Rossi dedicated himself to a more solemn, timeless architecture. Structures that wrestled with weighty themes like history, time and death.

Of course, in the early 1960s, Rossi was still a small-time theorist and critic, dabbling in a couple of minor projects. Very few outside Milan, and even fewer outside Italy, knew his name. But after working with Carlo Aymonino on the landmark Monte Amiata complex, and the international success of San Cataldo, not to mention the publication of his own seminal bestseller, The Architecture of a City, Rossi had officially arrived.

By the end of the 70s, the question 'What comes after Modernism?' had been answered, and the answer – at least for some critics – was Aldo Rossi.

There followed a string of architectural bangers, including a floating theatre in Venice (Teatro del Mondo, 1979), a geometric elementary school (Fagnano Olona, 1972) and a controversial reconstruction of Genoa's bombed-out opera house (Carlo Felice Theatre, 1981). Rossi designed acclaimed public buildings and residential projects from Fukuoka to Florida, picking up swags of awards along the way.

By the 1980s, Rossi's genius had escaped the cloistered world of architecture and was sniffing around for something to do. That something turned out to be product design.

Collaborating with renowned Italian label, Alessi, he created dozens of household objects, including the famous La Conica coffee maker (1984). What's interesting about these pieces is that they kind of resemble little civic monuments in their own right. Each one is distinctly, inescapably architectural. Browsing through Alessi's online catalogue, it's easy to imagine Rossi's espresso machines and sugar bowls towering over the Piazza del Duomo, blown up to the size of cathedrals.

La Conica, for example – arguably his most famous Alessi piece – is a simple cone atop a cylinder, evoking the domes and towers of Romanesque Europe. His AR04 lamp wouldn't look out of place illuminating a street corner in 1930s Manhattan. His kettle, Il Conico, reads like a tiny industrial factory. You can almost picture smoke, rather than steam, rising from the spout.

Many of these designs, along with his architectural work, can be found in Rossi's notebooks. Of which there are many. A relentless scribbler, doodler and note-taker, for Rossi, drawing was analogous to thinking; an act of remembrance all in itself. Long before CAD became the architect's tool of choice, Rossi sketched out his new philosophy by hand, in page after page of cubes, domes, towers, windows, coffeepots and chairs – shapes that somehow manage to blend the civic and the symbolic. Many of these have been exhibited as artworks in their own right, both at MoMA and the Venice Biennale.

Unfortunately, Rossi died in a car crash in 1997. He was just 66 years old. If you'd carved, 'The Most Influential Italian Architect of The Late 20th Century' on his tombstone, no-one would have second-guessed you.

But perhaps it's best to think of Rossi in less rigid terms. He was, in many ways, the last great rational poet. Theoretically dense, but still accessible. A man who walked effortlessly between the worlds of romance and modernism, and whose work has a weird meditative quality that still haunts people today. Perhaps because we live in a world largely detached from physical memory.

A man who walked effortlessly between the worlds of romance and modernism, and whose work has a weird meditative quality that still haunts people today. Perhaps because we live in a world largely detached from physical memory.

A disposable, short-attention-span, plastic-y kind of world, unmoored from the past and hurtling towards an uncertain future. A world that probably needs Aldo Rossi more than ever.

"Architecture becomes the vehicle for an event we desire," he wrote once. "It is for this reason that the dimensions of a table or a house are very important. Not, as the functionalists thought, because they carry out a determined function, but because they permit other functions. They permit everything that is unforeseeable in life."