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Lost City, Resumed Architectures The cemetery Octagon of Villetta and other funeral architectures in Parma by Michela Rossi reviewed by Federica Ottoni ETS Editions, Pisa, February 2007 Project: Cemeteries Planning of Parma Planner: University of Parma, Department of Civil engineering, Environment, Territory and Architecture Place: Municipality of Parma Period: 2005-2007
The result it’s a strange mixed book, created by different authors, each one with a story to tell and with a personal way to do it. Starting from the history of a cemetery, we could read about its foundation, finding out the way of construction of the city of deaths, looking at its political and architectural grown, in order to resume a lived memory, as if we could recognize all the inhabitants of this lost city. Religion and communities are investigated in their relationship with death, also focusing on the original urban connection between the city and the cemetery, through an analysis in which the boundaries between architecture and social features are not so defined. Ancient maps show the boulevard planned at the time of the cemetery construction, which represents both a physical and symbolic road from life to death, and from present to past. Sculptures and paintings, architectures and plan, connections and cloisters, become the elements of a great collective wall painting, from which the characters of our past continue to tell us their stories, buried by soil and stones. The original architectonic point of view involves then other type of analysis, extending itself on a urban scale. In this way, the previous object of this study, the main urban cemetery of the “Villetta”, becomes a pretext to research a correct way of managing a real system of several separated structures, which could recover their connection in an architectural general plan.
The past seems to be a good point from which start an investigation on the future. So a statistical analysis of social and political data represents the natural evolution of a study which involved structures and functions, aesthetic and social relationships; it seems to give fundamental hints for the following planning of the burial-places of a city.
As if the architecture could be the common place on which all the problems involved in a urban and social organization would be solved, the last pages of this dense and interesting trip are reserved to the new projects. Three different ways of thinking death are showed in three designs of new architects, concluding a research always suspended between life and death. To recover a lost city to present. Contact: web: www.unipr.it email: michela.rossi@unipr.it
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