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Modena
This stop was our last, and we were finishing our 10 day journey with a visit to the San Cataldo Cemetery, by Aldo Rossi.
This is not an ordinary cemetery, and certainly not something anyone other than architects would bother to look at, other than friends or family members of those laid to rest. It’s barely half-finished, if that, and looks like an abandoned long warehouse stacked to the roof with walls of shelved coffins.
The design was the winning selection from a competition in 1971, and was conceived as a “city for the dead”. I have a lot of questions about this place, and the role of an architect in such a delicate spectrum. It’s one of the building types that we will always need, so it’s up to someone to design something. To step up and be the guy that bridges the life and death gap, however, is bold.
How do you design a place that doesn’t distract from the connection between the loving living and the loved dead? I wonder if the people visiting the deceased find it disrespectful, or completely appropriate. All I know is it takes a ton of confidence to be able to design something so radical for something so deeply rooted in tradition - For that, I admire Rossi. It’s so hard to make sense of it, but I think that’s true for most things I like.
Maybe it was a little ironic that we ended the trip with a cemetery. We were very tired, and we saw so many things we’ve had on our list of “things to see” for most of our lives. It was time for some rest.
