A. Roselli Biography
Alberto Rosselli (1921 - 1976) was born in Palermo in 1921. In the early 1940s he enrolled in the engineering faculty at the Polytechnic of Milan, but was forced to interrupt his studies after only a few months due to the war where he was involved as a soldier . Following the death of both brothers, Rosselli was interned in Switzerland, where he remained for approximately 2 years. It is here that he meets Ernesto Nathan Rogers who, with other colleagues, holds architecture courses within the university internment camps. A few months later he began attending architecture school in Lausanne, where he remained until returning to Italy at the end of the war. He completed his studies in 1947 at the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic of Milan. From 1949 to 1954 he edited the Drawing for Industry column in Domus, a magazine directed by Gio Ponti. In 1951 he began his profession as a designer working for companies such as Cassina, Rima, Kartell, Saporiti and Montecatini, where he explored materials and new technologies. In 1952 he joined Gio Ponti and the engineer Antonio Fornaroli in the Ponti–Fornaroli–Rosselli (PFR) architecture studio based in Milan. It is with them that he will work on famous projects such as the Pirelli skyscraper in Milan (1956-60) or the secretariats of the new Pakistan government in Islamabad (1962-65). He is the creator and director of the magazine Stile Industria (1954-63), with which he opens a discussion on the role of the designer and the meaning of design within the complex relationship between designer, industry and public, submitting to readers suggestions from Italy and from the international scene. It was also in the same year, 1954, that, at the suggestion of Gio Ponti, he established the Compasso d'Oro award together with Marco Zanuso. In 1956 he was among the founders of the ADI, Association for Industrial Design, of which he was first president (1956-57) and member of the board of directors (1967-68). Since 1963 he has been a freelance lecturer at the Polytechnic of Milan where he held the course in Artistic Design for Industry at the Faculty of Architecture, bringing the subject of design into the university. Here he directs a research group made up of Adriana Baglioni, Costantino Corsini, Luigi Moretti, Marco Simonazzi and Giuseppe Turchini. His most mature works in the field of industrial design date back to the early 1970s with the design of vehicles for Carrozzeria Fiat-Orlandi, such as the Meteor grand touring coach (1968-1970) and the truck cab (1970- 1971), the creation of the Mobile Home on the occasion of the exhibition Italy: The New Domestic Landscape at the MoMA in New York (1972), and the design of modular housing systems, such as the Case Romagnoli industrialized building system (1969-70 ), the prefabricated sanitary units for ICS (1972-73), or the Facomet office furniture (Talking Office series, 1971-73). He died in Milan of a cerebral hemorrhage on 10 July 1976.
