Aldo Rossi; Won Pritzker Prize in Architecture

Aldo Rossi, the first Italian to win the Pritzker International Prize for Architecture, died Thursday in a hospital here, university colleagues said.

Rossi, 66, died of injuries suffered in a car crash last week, the Italian news agency ANSA reported.

The Milan-born Rossi, who was awarded the Pritzker Prize in 1990, designed the World Theater, a floating theater created for the Venice Biennale in 1979, and the Museum of Maastricht in the Netherlands.

His receipt of the Pritzker was announced in Los Angeles, home of its prior recipient, Frank Gehry. The award was formally presented to Rossi at the Palazzo Grassi Museum in Venice, Italy.

The prize, considered the world’s most prestigious architecture award, was established in 1979 to honor a field not covered by the Nobel prizes. It was named for Jay Pritzker, president of the Hyatt Foundation. Winners receive $100,000 and a bronze sculpture.

The Pritzker jury declared Rossi’s work “at once bold and ordinary, original without being novel, refreshingly simple in appearance but extremely complex in content and meaning.”

The jury added: “In a period of diverse styles and influence, Aldo Rossi has eschewed the fashionable and popular to create an architecture singularly his own.”

Rossi was known almost as well for his haunting drawings of his designs as for the buildings themselves. A selection of his drawings and etchings was shown at the Kirsten Kiser Gallery in Los Angeles in 1988.

The architect also designed artistic household items such as La Conica, a copper-bottomed, stainless steel espresso maker with a conical lid, and a companion tea kettle called Il Conico. Manufactured by the Italian firm Alessi, the items were sold in museum and art shops.

Rossi was the author of “A Scientific Autobiography” in 1981. Since 1976, he had been a professor at the Architectural Institute in Venice.

He is survived by his wife and two children.