1990 Pritzker Prize-winning architect Aldo Rossi designed both the coffee pots and the Venetian theater above. Rossi, who often paints teapots into his cityscapes, designed the Teatro del Mondo for the 1979 Venice Biennale. Made of plywood, it was build on a barge, and was moved around Venice – creating a puzzle piece of a building which continually changed its relationship to its neighbors. At one point, the theater was “docked” at the end of Piazza San Marco, closing it’s open end temporarily. Imagine a city where all buildings were moving, and where squares opened and closed over time, streets rearranged, and your neighbors were always new.

This is, of course, what happens to a city over a long period of time – but Rossi condensed that experience from centuries into weeks, so that a single visitor to Venice could experience that kind of fluidity. Perhaps the use of teapot forms, and the scale-changes that implies, makes reference to the time-scale shifts?

Link to a bio on Rossi from the Pritzker Prize website.

Below: Piazza San Marco in plan. Minus the Teatro.

Popularity: 5% [?]

Digg this | Hugg this

See Also: The Three Twins Treat!,

This entry was posted by Jeffrey Warren on Tuesday, August 22nd, 2006 at 2:07 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.