Aldo Rossi
The late Aldo Rossi has achieved distinction as a theorist, an author, an artist, a teacher and as a architect, in his native Italy as well as internationally. Vincent Scully, in an introductory essay to a book on Rossi published by Rizzoli, compares him to LeCorbusier as a painter-architect. Ada Louise Huxtable, architectural critic and Pritzker juror has described Rossi as "a poet who happens to be an architect." 
Rossi was born in Milan, Italy where his father was engaged in the manufacture of bicycles, bearing the family name, a business he says was founded by his grandfather. 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 early film aspirations were gradually transposed to architecture, he still retains strong interest in drama. In fact, he says, "In all of my architecture, I have always been fascinated by the theatre." 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." More recently, he completed a major building for Genoa, the Carlo Felice Theatre which is the National Opera House. 
In Canada, the first Rossi project in the Western Hemisphere was completed in 1987 when the Toronto Lighthouse Theatre was built on the banks of Lake Ontario. 
In his book, A Scientific Autobiography, he describes an auto accident that occurred in 1971 as being a turning point in his life, ending his youth, and inspiring a project for the cemetery at Modena. It was while