"Death and the Open: Notes for a Cemetery Defoundation"

Abstract:

Archaeological (past-oriented) and design-related (future-oriented) are two opposing yet nonetheless inventive motions – that is, both are acts of re-discovery. What is unearthed and put into question are, for the most part, the very foundations of things.
This paper, starting from the observation of today's Italian cemetery crisis, seeks to establish some theoretical and design bases for investigating this "foundational" tension (between the past and the possible future) of a specific and situated design thinking: that concerning the places of death in our cities. Through an archaeological movement of thought directed backward, an attempt has been made to bring to light the very "foundations" of these places, probing the crucial moments that have decided, regulated, and defined the constitutive elements of the modern cemetery's architecture – a spatiality that has remained substantially unchanged to today, particularly in the case of Italian monumental cemeteries. From this inquiry arises the definition of today's widespread modern cemetery realism: a (pathological) impasse of architectural thought whereby – hence its designation as a "realism" – it seems exceedingly difficult, even now, to reflect outside the "formal" constraints established by the Edict of Saint-Cloud (1804), in order to attempt to re-invent our burial grounds "exhausted enclosures". In order to move beyond such realism, this study has thus sought to initiate a theoretical and design exercise in the "defoundation" of the modern cemetery, offering a number of examples, also from different geographical contexts, that may help to articulate a penser autrement of design regarding these places.

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