Aldo Rossi’s unrealised buildings for Canary Wharf looked to Shakespeare’s Verona and Venice for inspiration

Date 1990
Location Canary Wharf, London
Architect Aldo Rossi

The Muf-curated British Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale explores the theme of cultural exchange between Britain and Venice. One example that they missed out was this project by Aldo Rossi for two buildings at Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands.

“The buildings will reflect my associations of London with Shakespeare’s world of Verona and Venice,” said Rossi, somewhat fancifully about this pair of 186,000sq m speculative office blocks at the western end of Olympia & York’s 28ha development.

Stone from Tuscany and Venice was intended to strengthen the theme.

The buildings would have been the first British project of the then 58-year-old Italian architect, who had received the Pritzker Prize earlier in the year. However, the economic downturn meant that they were never realised.

Rossi would go on to design an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery but when he died, in a car crash in 1997, he had built no permanent structures in the UK.

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