San Cataldo Cemetery
San Cataldo Cemetery (The City of the Dead) - Modena, Italy - Architect: Aldo Rossi - Completed: 1971 (Unfinished)
11 Photographs
“I cannot be Postmodern, as I have never been Modern” - Aldo Rossi
Sometime during my early days of architecture school, I remember coming across a small black and white image of the San Cataldo Cemetery, otherwise known as The City of the Dead, in a book on Italian architectural history. I recall being taken by this single image, not dissimilar to the first photograph in this series. I loved the bold geometry and the simplicity of the forms. Though not a follower of religion, I have always loved religious buildings and in particular the cemeteries that often surround or are connected to them, but this was something completely different from everything I had seen before. As a young architect to be, it seemed to speak to me of the possibilities of looking at something and seeing a completely new way of doing it.
Over the years, I kept stumbling across the building in journals and books, yet it wasn’t until 2011 that I finally found myself in northern Italy, on a train to Verona passing through Modena. While the small child inside me wanted to go looking for the bright crimson red of the nearby Ferrari factory, the architect in me had only one destination in mind as I disembarked. It was a baking hot Mediterranean day, the kind that we knew only too well from growing up on Tarndanya (the Adelaide Plains) and the short walk alongside the train line was anything but pleasant.
There is something unique about the experience of an architect visiting a building they know well. When we read drawings and view images we are able to translate them (with varying degrees of success) into imagined experiences of places, but nothing quite compares to visiting a building, no matter how well you think you know it. In this, I think the qualities of great architecture are impossible to transport. It’s very difficult to distinguish the good from the great without setting foot and eye upon it. At San Cataldo, it was the previously undiscovered moments of the place that impressed me much more than the vast open scorched courtyards, despite those open views of the square red ossuary building being so beguiling to my young architectural mind. It’s a fascinating place, beautiful and confusing in equal measure.
Interestingly, it was a few weeks later that I was lucky enough to visit Carlo Scarpa’s Tomba Brion, whom Rossi triumphed over in an architectural competition for the San Cataldo commission. This effectively book-ended a journey of half a lifetime, providing me with two vastly contrasting views of death and how we might approach this from a built perspective. But that place is a story for another post.
HWLK