Luigi Rosselli (1957–, Milan) is a Sydney-based architect of prestigious residential and retail buildings and interiors. Educated in Milan, Lausanne, Fribourg and New York, he has been practising in Australia since 1984, when he worked as 'chief inker’ with Romaldo Giurgola’s international team designing Australia’s New Parliament House in Canberra.
He established Luigi Rosselli Architects in Sydney in 1985 and since has built more than 120 comcepts. These include monumentally walled and daringly cantilevered structures, and some shaped like ships’ prows. Many of his residences have been constructed on spectacular coastal, clifftop, bush and red desert sites. Most of his projects were surveyed in his 2015 retrospective exhibition catalogue: Perspectives: Thirty Years of Sketches by Luigi Rosselli Architect.
Rosselli’s personal and architectural characters combine philosophies of romanticism and humanism from the French Swiss and northern Italian post-Renaissance traditions, with some of his notable early Sydney houses styled like Italian Baroque palazzos (notably a 1988 house in Northbridge, Sydney, for rock musician Kirk Pengilly (b. 1958); which is depicted as a sketch on Rosselli’s company logo). His architecture also expresses key design principles and precedents of organic modernism, as prototyped by Frank Lloyd Wright and reinterpreted by Alvar Aalto, Wright’s follower in Finland.
Rosselli is the son of Italian industrialist Raffaelo Rosselli and Swiss social worker Denise de Montmollin. As a child and teenager during the 1960s and 1970s, he was impressed by the works of Milanese artist Giorgio di Chirico, designer Giò Ponti and architect Aldo Rossi. During his architectural education at the École Polytechnique Federale du Lausanne (EPFL), he also was especially influenced by professors Umberto Riva, Álvaro Siza Viera, Rafael Moneo, and Kenneth Frampton. During 1979, he was a student architect working with Mario Botta on design development of the state bank in Fribourg. In the dissertation for his 1984 graduation exhibition, Rosselli promoted the concept of eclectic architecture, and his designs remain affected by diverse, often romantic, inspirations.
Sources
—Luigi Rosselli, notes and interviews recorded by Davina Jackson, 2015.
—Sydney Morning Herald (Domain section) video interview with Luigi Rosselli, online at http://media.domain.com.au/property/amazing-homes/inspired-mix-of-old-and-new-2553874.html (accessed November 2015).
- Writers:
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- Date written:
- 2015
- Last updated:
- 2015
