Extension of Gubbio Cemetery

The enlargement of the Gubbio cemetery is the result of studies of a new model of public building. On the one hand, it has developed the latest phase of growth of the monumental cemetery in Gubbio, one of Italy’s most important medieval cities. On the other hand, it intends to redefine its meaning and centrality within the structure of the city.

This concept of urban settlement is emphasized by the inclusion of large square enclosures designed to be open spaces that provide the structure with spatial rhythm.

These spaces were inspired by James Turrell’s Skyspaces and are designed to be enjoyable public areas, independently from the cemetery, offering an opportunity to pause and reflect. These are cubic“squares of silence” having open ceilings that evoke windows open to the sky.

This relationship with the sky intends to define space that is also time, in such a way that you can find yourself again, a space that thrusts the horizon upwards like a metaphor of the boundaries of heaven, the last horizon of our life in a modern city.

At the same time, opening to the sky, it re-interprets Leon Battista Alberti’s window, a window that is like a threshold, imagined by the great Renaissance architect as the only architectural artifice able to “instil the peacefulness” evoked by the celestial void that, descending from above, takes us back to the imperturbable state of the soul without which overcoming the adversities of life is impossible.

These installations were created by two important Italian artists (Sauro Cardinali and Nicola Renzi), with whom collaboration began during the initial stage of the project.

William Richard Lethaby said that human beings cannot understand the world as a whole.

In this sense a building can be seen as a model of the world; it represents an order we cannot directly experience in the world, but at the same time it makes perceptible, within the limits of a building, that which exists in the world.