New Cemetery of Nice – GRAU: Paola Chiatante, Aldo Coacci, Gabriella Colucci, Roberto Mariotti and Franco Pierluisi, 1983.
The G.R.A.U’s contribution to the existing architectural debate was timely in putting into focus the question of representing architectonics. It brought about a research that concentrating on the design stages, consequently recuperated a disciplinary “tool” to attain knowledge, as well as an “aesthetic“ value related to beauty by reacquiring the symbolic meaning of historical forms. History, as the G.R.A.U seems to reveal, can be detached from happenings to assure absolute, abstract Values. Nor is history linked with disciplines or places with dei daily occurrences: thus, to a history seen as a continuous process, they juxtaposed the fundamentals of it. Their overall program was thus always a project that resisted the metropolis as the place in which the traditional categories of time, space and event had lost the emphasis that “capital” letters denote, to become instead disquieting illusive presence. The place each G.R.A.U. project still refers to, is the renaissance city, not the site of equivalent spaces or the modern city with its distinct parts. The vainness of such an apposition is due to the impossibility for such a project to sever the metropolitan rhythm or to be an event capable of changing the order of things. The design of the Nice Cemetery prompts considerations also regarding the specific theme, and is to be compared with other related G.R.A.U designs. Undoubtedly the theme is enhanced by its poetic tension striving to give expression to history in order to “remind”. It is planning for “somewhere else”, where the symbol representing the deceased is acquired through the architecture via a meaningfully regulated orderliness. Seeing the new cemetery of Parabita, the studies for the competition for Modena’s new cemetery, the communal cemetery of S. Severina, one observes their undoubtedly individual characteristics which constitute the precedents for a historic survey that enables to assess also this recent scheme. The same symbolic abstraction is found in Nice, although perhaps it is more complex. The city necropolis may be suitably interpreted, by literally using as a quotation the geometric patterns utilized in renaissance fortifications selects the more disciplined balanced shapes, and paying more attention to the manneristic inflections of a “Vignola” than the disquieting problematics of a Michelangelo or the ambiguous zoomorphic statements of a Francesco di Giorgio Martini. The system becomes critical when a renaissance mechanism is contaminated by the more mechanistic arrangement of futuristic art forms. The place’s identity is generated by closely combining two heterogeneous systems: the static central spaces (with star shaped forms) and a succession of paths. However, as opposed to the author’s other cemetery designs the one in Nice forsakes certain balanced statements, based on analogical rules and symmetry, to privilege instead the symbolic dimension of the route along which the beginning and the ending are more emphatically definitive. And the single juxtaposed elements all have incommunicative independence. Differences here between modern and postmodern statements are annulled. The awareness that metaphorically the “signs” may be interchanged by the arbitrariness of the rules is what characterizes the aims of design’s research. If the planning in Nice is carefully observed, the evident ambiguity of its references transpires. The correspondence of the modern necropolis and say a renaissance villa representing a cosmic pattern, finds its design expression in the mechanistic myths of avantgarde art forms, recalling the die-casting used for the simulacra of machine age features, capable of being mass produced. As for nature’s romantic appeal, it was present in Parabita, but appears to be superseded here. There are no symbolic citations either, and above all the symbols have no correspondence. The architectural construct is a self generated growth system, without identity. It conspicuously displays the unfinished atmosphere of a construction site overly disclosing the grid’s matrix that regulates the whole setting, and beside this, only the forcefully started list of materials, openings and functions is noticed.
