Theater of the World

Aldo Rossi – Theater of the World – inaugurated in Venice Italy, 1979

The Theater of the world was inaugurated in Venice Italy in 1979 and represented one of the installations for the 1980 Venice Biennale.
It was, and still is, one of the most evocative projects of Aldo Rossi's work. The theater was built in a basin of Fusina, a small lagoon port, on a barge. He was then towed to Venice and moored at Punta della Dogana, on the Grand Canal, in front of Piazza San Marco.

The building consisted of a supporting structure in steel tubes covered with a wooden plank and reached a total height of 25 meters. The main body of the theater consisted of a parallelepiped with a square base of about 9.5 meters on each side and 11 meters high. On its top an octagonal drum supported a pitched zinc roof. Inside, the stage was located in the center, and the audience took their places at the sides or in the galleries on the upper floor reachable by the stairs placed on the sides of the parallelepiped.
The theater could accommodate up to 400 spectators of which 250 were seated. At the end of the Biennale events, the World Theater crossed the Adriatic to reach Dubrovnik. In 1981 the work was dismantled.

In 2004 the Theater was rebuilt in Genoa as one of the installations of the celebrations of "Genoa European Capital of Culture". Since the original project drawings were not found, the reconstruction of the Teatro del Mondo took place after extensive studies allowing the perfect reproduction of the work both from the architectural and structural point of view.