San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena

This early work by Aldo Rossi remains unfinished, and there appear to be plans to modify it considerably. In fact, part of it has already been modified. Yet this does not seem to bother many. The woman at the entrance of the cemetery said that few people visited, and that she could hardly understand why I did. In her opinion the building was ugly and depressing. Similarly, I met some Milan architects while in Italy who could not believe I would rather visit works by Rossi than others by more fashionable architects, say Libeskind or Fuksas. They thought of the cemetery as nothing more than an extravagant curiosity.

I was bothered by the general lack of appreciation for this building, which I consider one of the most significant of the second half of the 20th century. Few have achieved to make architecture metaphysical. Entering the cemetery is like entering the world of platonic forms, where time (and thus decay) does not exist. The visitor is inevitably confronted with death, but also with the hope for eternity; the cemetery's simple shapes and spatial configuration separate visitors from their everyday lives and introduce them into something like a Cartesian plane where truths are constant and irrevocable.

Rossi's exploration of the simple shapes and architectural elements is also a statement on architecture itself. While Libeskind and Fuksas might spend days and weeks and months making sure their buildings do not look like buildings, Rossi struggled throughout his career to apprehend and communicate in his designs the essence of the basic components of the built environment--walls, columns, floor and roof slabs, and hallways, porticos, windows and doorways. Hence the cemetery's repetitive and exaggerated gestures (which many fail to see as more than caricatures). In this way, Rossi was similar to the Russian Suprematists and the Dutch Neoplasticists, who painted compositions of lines and planes in basic colors to achieve spiritual effects.