exhuming architecture

Saturday, May 5, 2012

walk through c...

in case you didn't know what a columbarium for urns looks like... here's nelson bayardo's in montevideo's cementerio del norte (1969)

Thursday, May 3, 2012

collage | drawing

i meant to show this to you before... its a nice collage on a (mirallesque) drawing [site section+plan] from an earlier time...

by (our very own) katie degregorio

Thursday, April 26, 2012

A cemetery is not a tomb. It is rather, a relationship with the landscape and with forgetting: imprints like abstract signs, an abstraction that begins with walking and with tracing the best path with one’s steps.

Walking produces a furrow that is a path of coming and going: the tombs will be in its interior and trees will make the space dense, like characters inhabiting the shadows of the walls produced by the cut in the earth. A modest pavement, in cement and wood, gathers dust and fallen dried leaves.

The chapel is found where the entry path widens in a clearing and the descent toward the tombs begins. One begins to forget the brutal industral surroundings and concentrates on the natural topography of this place, the valley formed by a small stream…

It has always seemed that we were working in a place where this project already existed; it seemed complete to me from the very first breaking of the earth. The memories are deposited in the fissures of the tombs, the vegetation fills the empty spaces of the embankment, and the shadows begin to act as a clock.

– Enric Miralles, “Mixed Talks”

Thursday, April 19, 2012

definitions...

cemeteries produce in me a sensation similar to that of being on a roller coaster, a delightful vertigo. i'm scared of a place with so many dead people, but it calms me down knowing that they are well buried. i don't know what their enchantment is based on, maybe on the relief of knowing that we're not with them yet, or maybe just the opposite, the eagerness to know what if feels like being there. san pedro cemetery is particularly beautiful, all white and with lots of marble, a traditional cemetery where the dead sleep on top of each other, in contrast to the modern ones that look more like a patch of tacky flower pots. there are also mausoleums where important people rest; grouped with their families and looked over by huge statues of guardian angels and angels of silence.

- jorge franco, rosario tijeras

Tuesday, April 3, 2012

Monday, April 2, 2012

arnold bocklin, isle of the dead

... art has this magic power only as the power of negation. it can speak its own language only as long as the images are alive which refuse and refute the established order.

- herbert marcuse, one dimensional man