| Thanks to Thomas Mann, Luciano Visconti, Mahler and Dirk Bogarde in dodgy make-up - to say nothing of rising water levels - Venice has long been associated with death. But the old island cemetery of San Michele, now 400 years old, cannot cope with more corpses. David Chipperfield Architects' proposed additions, selected in an international competition, will create a series of new walled spaces, and ultimately, a new island separated from the existing cemetery by a narrow canal. Eschewing the weakly classical layout of the original, Chipperfield offers a series of walled rooms in dynamic rather than symmetrical balance. Carefully placed openings suggest movement and inform the relationship between the different spaces; tombs will be within the walls' thickness. Here modern minimalism seeks to create, in a contemporary idiom, the sense of repose that classicism once uniquely embodied. In contrast to the old, the new island has a stepped garden to the water's edge, symbolically joining the world's of death and life; here too, is evidence that European Rationalism is far from dead. |
