The exhibition will be opened by Italy's ambassador to Hungary Paolo Guido Spinelli and head of the architecture department at the University of Modena Gianni Braghieri.
Rossi achieved distinction as a theorist, an author, an artist and a teacher as well as an architect. Vincent Scully, in an introductory essay to a book on Rossi published by Rizzoli, compared him to LeCorbusier as a painter-architect.
Rossi was born in Milan, where his family ran a bicycle-building business. While growing up during the years of World War II, Rossi studied at the School of the Somaschi Fathers in Lake Como, and later at the Collegio Alessandro Votas in Lecco. Shortly after the war ended, he entered the Milan Polytechnic receiving his architecture degree in 1959.
Although his early film aspirations were gradually transposed to architecture, he still retained strong interest in drama.
"In all of my architecture, I have always been fascinated by the theatre," he said.
Aldo Rossi
For the Venice Biennale in 1979, he designed the Teatro del Mondo, a floating theatre, built under a joint commission from the theatre and architecture commissions of the Biennale. It seated 250 around a central stage. It was towed by sea to the Punta della Dogana where it remained through the Biennale. Rossi described the project in its site as "a place where architecture ended and the world of the imagination began."
Plans for the theatre can be seen at the VAM Design exhibition, along with Rossi's designs for a theatre in Peruga's Fontivegge quarter and plans for the reconstruction of Venice's La Fenice, which burnt down in 1996. It also shows plans of Genoa's Carlo Felice Theatre and the Frankfurt-an-der-Oder Theatre as well as Rossi's design for an Alessi coffee and tea set.
In 1990, Rossi was awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for architects. Ada Louise Huxtable, one of the prize's jurors, called him a poet.
In its citation, the jury called Rossi a "wunderkind".
