Igualada Cemetery
Encyclopedia
Igualada
Igualada is a municipality of the province of Barcelona in Catalonia . It is located on the left bank of the Anoia river, and at the western end of the Igualada-Martorell-Barcelona railway. Igualada is the capital and central market of the Anoia comarca, a rich agricultural and wine-producing...
, near Barcelona
Barcelona (province)
Barcelona is a province of eastern Spain, in the center of the autonomous community of Catalonia.-Overview:It is bordered by the provinces of Tarragona, Lleida, and Girona, and by the Mediterranean Sea....
, Catalonia
Catalonia
Catalonia is an autonomous community in northeastern Spain, with the official status of a "nationality" of Spain. Catalonia comprises four provinces: Barcelona, Girona, Lleida, and Tarragona. Its capital and largest city is Barcelona. Catalonia covers an area of 32,114 km² and has an...
, Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
, designed by the architects Enric Miralles
Enric Miralles
Enric Miralles Moya was a Spanish Catalan architect. He graduated from the School of Architecture of Barcelona at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 1978. After establishing his reputation with a number of collaborations with his first wife Carme Pinós, the couple separated in 1991...
and Carme Pinós
Carme Pinós
Carme Pinós is a Spanish Catalan architect.Graduated at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona in 1979. From 1982 on she formed a partnership with her husband, Enric Miralles, which ended in 1991...
after winning an architectural competition in 1984. Constructed between 1985 and 1994 as a replacement for the Old Cemetery (Catalan: "Cementiri Vell"), the cemetery became widely regarded as one of the most poetic works of twentieth century Catalan architecture. Enric Miralles
Enric Miralles
Enric Miralles Moya was a Spanish Catalan architect. He graduated from the School of Architecture of Barcelona at the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya in 1978. After establishing his reputation with a number of collaborations with his first wife Carme Pinós, the couple separated in 1991...
, who died in the year 2000 is buried in one of the tombs.
Architectural concept
Miralles and Pinós were concerned, not just to design a cemetery, but to explore poetic ideas regarding the acceptance of the cycle of life to enable a link between the past, the present, and the future.The project is conceived, in part, as an earthwork that transforms the surrounding landscape and also, in part, as a metaphor for the river of life. A processional "street" descends from the entrance, where crossed, rusting, steel poles doubling as gates and likened to the crosses at Calvary
Calvary
Calvary or Golgotha was the site, outside of ancient Jerusalem’s early first century walls, at which the crucifixion of Jesus is said to have occurred. Calvary and Golgotha are the English names for the site used in Western Christianity...
, proclaim the start of a winding pathway towards the burial area. The route is lined with repeatable concrete loculi
Loculus (architecture)
Loculus is a Latin word literally meaning little place and was used in a number of senses. In architecture it is a recess large enough to receive a human corpse. Usually found in either a catacomb, hypogeum, mausoleum or other place of entombment. Loculus can also refer to an alternative name for...
forming retaining walls and the floor of the path has railway sleepers set into its concrete surface. The intention was to bring the bereaved down into the landscape to a 'city of the dead', an in between place where the dead and the living are brought closer together. The spaces are designed to provoke thoughts and memories.
Critique and influence
Zabalbeascoa sees Miralles's work in general, and the cemetery in particular, as being architecture "which 'naturally' adapts itself to a given site" but cannot be termed simply Organic architectureOrganic architecture
Organic architecture is a philosophy of architecture which promotes harmony between human habitation and the natural world through design approaches so sympathetic and well integrated with its site that buildings, furnishings, and surroundings become part of a unified, interrelated...
. His work is "more than simply interpreting the programme
Brief (architecture)
An architectural brief is, in its broadest sense, a requirement a client may have that an architect designs to meet, usually by creating a building to accommodate the requirement. A brief is a written document that might be anything from a single page to a multiple volume set of documents...
[brief] or observing a site's geographical landscape, however attentively, his architecture explores pre-existing traces in the cultural landscape of each project." The cemetery can thus be considered as architecture of the land that involves a humanisation of the brief
Brief
Brief or briefs may refer to:* A firefox extension for RSS* A letter* A papal letter less formal than a bull, sealed with the pope's signet ring or stamped with the device borne on this ring...
and appreciation of the topography
Topography
Topography is the study of Earth's surface shape and features or those ofplanets, moons, and asteroids...
- that is, the visible, physical land as well as the memories contained within it. This is seen by Zabalbeascoa in contrast to the particular form of Critical regionalism
Critical regionalism
Critical Regionalism is an approach to architecture that strives to counter placelessness and lack of identity in Modern Architecture by utilizing the building's geographical context...
which prevailed in the Spanish architectural scene of the 1970s which had tended towards a more sentimental or scenographic type of architecture.
"What sort of cultural landscape is it, in other words, that takes up sides with nature against the monumentalist enterprise of culture, especially when it was suppoes to offer visitors an intimation of immortality? ......[it is] one that redefines the terms, such that nature is no longer understood as the unproblematic opposite of culture, death no longer the mere antithesis of life."
