01 X INFO
02 X DESCRIPTION
Planning a building, [Re]writing a building. This is the main theme of our project.
The building chosen to become a cemetery architecture is now a frame, it was built in the 80s and it’s located in the South of Milan. It was planned to create a commercial area surrounded by a green area. This building is like a limit between city and fields. This limit is very well visible. The idea of its new function, or better “[Re]writing”, comes from the first “meeting” with the building itself: the inspection.
In this first phase the building is a frame characterised by unnatural essentiality and rigidity. This building must rise again. This is the reason why we have planned to give a new function to it: a cemetery. Only a frame of beams and pillars could host dead people forever. Starting from 18th century the cemetery had a very important function in the city, it was a dynamic constituent of the urban network. After this period a break happened: the cemetery architecture became more and more isolated and left out of the walls of the city. Nowadays the situation is completely different: the city (Milan) is now absorbing cemeteries.
The project focuses on the statement that the cemetery architecture is part of the city, it’s protected and intimate but dynamic at the same time. This building is in between two completely different worlds (it’s like a sign of fate): human world and nature. It has been realised only though symmetries and rigidity and it refers to similar architectures like “Il Cubo” by Aldo Rossi or the enlargement of Voghera cemetery planned by Monestiroli, in which the focus in not death, but the sense of separation that death provokes. Therefore, this building could rise again only as a cemetery architecture.
The planning of the building has some fundamental values which correspond to 4 different themes:
- The fence, which is a big sloping wall, surrounds the building and it’s rotated compared to the axis of symmetry; it creates new areas.
- The path, which is a big ramp located in the middle of the building; it leads to each floor and it connects each floor to all the others. It represents the processional path we usually walk during funerals.
- The intimacy which is given by the sloping line and characterises the fence and the burial recesses; it comes from an in-depth study on planning solutions realised by Scarpa in his project of Brion’s tomb.
- The cloth. Its matter allows to realize a ground floor which includes two leave rooms; these two are fleeting and unreal rooms in which we become estranged with the rest of the world.
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