House of The Dead

As she walked in through the entrance, little did she know the day when it all had started.

YUGOSLAVIA. 1971.

PROSECUTION. CONVICTION. ARREST.

Public unrest happened in the country due to the breakout and demonstrations of radical nationalists fighting the political unitarism. It was the war where Aldo Rossi was trapped. He drove his way to Istanbul passing the country in turmoil and had a car crash. He was taken into a small hospital, Slawonski Brod. Being rooted to bed, knowing that the hospital can be bombed anytime, he was thinking that his time in this world would end.

FRAGMENTS

The incident that almost ended his life, was actually a turning point of his life and work. It made him re-evaluate his approach on architecture. During his hospitalization, he began to theorize about the structure of his body as a series of fractures that had to be put together again (extracted from ArchDaily). The fractures would be later perceived as fragments, quoting his writing “the question of the fragment in architecture is very important since it may be that only ruins express a fact completely. I am thinking of a unity, or a system, made solely by reassembled fragments.” 

Analogically, people live as fragments as part of the universe.  They don’t have the global vision but they are part of “something” which can be culture, society, typology, vision, realities, urbans, communities. Like also life and death, they are fragments of human’s stage or even fragments of universes. As architecture, it was his responsibility to connect these fragments. Implemented to San Cataldo Cemetery, which grounds was firstly the home of an ancient cemetery by architect Cesare Costa carried out from 1858 to 1876, containing a vast amount of hand carved and engraved statues and tombstones, Rossi has taken the fragments of formal composition found within these cemeteries and transformed or reduced specific elements to represent them in his own plan. And the cemetery itself is a fragment of urban cities.

She was walking through the entrance, when she spotted that the cube-shaped ossuary stood in the center of the cemetery, surrounded by farsighted walls, as if it was a house which was fenced in. It appeared to her as `a deserted house in a post-war plain grass, abandoned for years due to the floods brought by the water current from the river bank, destroying the plants surrounding and damp the walls, where inside one can find shattered glass and left-over appliances, and the roof was gone, leaving an empty void with wild grass growing inside the house covering the skeletal bones of animals.

There she thought, while a chill wind sweeping at the back of her neck, the house of the dead, where the memories, things that outlast the mortality, are dwelling but forgotten. It is the way Rossi contradicts the concept, where the ossuary, as function, is a place to keep the bodies as a remembrance of the deeds that are honored and not forgotten.

She walked the path towards the ossuary, passing large empty green yard, and noticed that the terracotta colors filled her eyes. Walls are rendered in pale rose while the ossuary in slightly darker red. Enclosing the ossuary were buildings in stark grey concrete which were roofed in muted sky-blue. These choice of colors shows the elements of earth. She thought, that this must have been the only colors Rossi was looking at through his room window in the Slawonski Brod while he was thinking about the deads who would join and fuse back into the earth, “Perhaps as a result of this incident, the idea of the cemetery at Modena was born in the little hospital of Slawonski Brod, and simultaneously, my youth reached its end,” he once said. Memory had left its trace in Rossi’s head and given him an instrument to elaborate his concept and interpretation for his work. There had to be connection between the memory and the autonomy of architectural form.

MEMORIES

Memories are vague, unclear, non-engineer source or material, nor exact science, and even cumbersome. Memories are not imagination but related to, they provoke the ideas of forms analogically which are unreal, silent, and go through sense.

Rossi created forms by bringing the idea of the reality, history, and memory, to be translated into a building, monuments, architectures, which basically are artifacts of urban living. By this means, the memories can embodied transcending the time and layers of life. Buildings are collective journeys witnessed through every piece of stones that support them. San Cataldo Cemetery, exposing the concept, is a dialogue between the memory system and construction, memories that are employed for its highly personal confrontation to be infused in the architectonic concept.

There, she was wandering by herself, pondering the question of the after-life, where the souls advance when they leave the body as the container. Whether the body still has a meaning afterwards. Whether the existence of souls is proved as they are formless, just like memories. Whether they exist just because they are part of the consciousness. Whether they are truly the immaterial parts of humans that are immortal or material part that can be explained by particle or dust in the air through science. Whether memories are carried away by souls and remain in the mind of people who are being left in the mortal world.

REMAINS OF A MAN

As she was collecting the interpretation of Rossi’s memories along the cemetery, she was stopped inside the ossuary cube. The elements were mostly metal in a glance. The walls were designed in colonnades enclosing the graveyard with metal staircases ascending and descending the interior walls in symmetry. The rows are identical with windows and doorways are put in symmetry, with small concrete square holes spread in the concrete columns with an even gap distance between the columns. There is where the families put the remembrance of their loved ones who have died. However, she observed that half of these blocks are empty and she surmised why.

Rossi died in 1997 because of another fatal car accident, which was ironic. He started it by an accident, and it was ended due to another accident, and the cemetery was left incomplete since then. The construction had been planned in steps by looking at the needs of the citizen which evolved in parallel with time, in line with Rossi’s social context in architecture that architecture is a dialogue between humans and space. Due to this incompleteness, people prefer other funeral structures and even further the cemetery is slowly emptied. It is another irony that even his cemetery is abandoned from the dead itself. The cemetery is failing to stand as un urban fragment. She thinks that, this is what remains of him. The remains of a man.