ack in 1998, David Chipperield Architects (DCA)
beat 145 other contenders to win a global competition
for an extension to the Venetian island cemetery of
San Michele. Thanks to the vagaries of Italian funding
and bureaucracy, work didn’t begin until 2004.
Another 14 years on, and the second (and potentially,
last) phase of a revised scheme – including a new dock
to supplement the existing pontoon on the island’s west
side, and an administrative building– is now complete.
San Michele has been the city’s sole burial ground
since 1837, and within its wave-lapped walls lie the
tombs of generations of Venetians, as well as some
illustrious foreigners, including ballet impresario
Serge Diaghilev, composer Igor Stravinsky and poet
Ezra Pound. After nearly 200 years of internments,
the cemetery was running out of space, so the 1998
competition called for new columbariums, a chapel and
a crematorium, plus an addition that would have seen
an entirely new island constructed alongside the old.
Giuseppe Zampieri, design director and partner of
DCA Milan, explains the genesis of the Chipperield
design partly as a reaction to the existing layout of the
site. ‘Being an island cemetery in the Venetian lagoon,
the conditions of San Michele make it pretty unique,’
he says. ‘In recent years, however, the increasingly
municipal character has become a contrast to itsromantic exterior. Our design tried to address this
imbalance and restore some of the cemetery’s original
monumental physical qualities. Rather than the
existing arrangement of tombs in parallel rows, the
scheme is a new arrangement of walls enclosing
rectangular courtyards. The walls are blind on the
exterior but lined with burial recesses internally to
emphasise this interiority and sense of intimacy.’
The project was developed in two main phases.
The irst element, the Courtyard of the Four
Evangelists, was completed in 2007, and its design –
being internally subdivided into smaller courtyards of
diferent sizes, with basalt walls and pavement inlaid
with text from the four gospels – served as a prototype
for the subsequent courtyards on the site. The second
phase, completed in 2017, includes an ossuary in white
Istrian stone, the Courtyard of the Three Archangels,
and a service building in red brick. For the moment,
a third phase, including more courtyards, an ossuary
and the new island extension, is still to be conirmed,
pending appropriate funding (the city having vastly
overspent on the controversial, still-uninished barrage
that is supposed to protect it from major loods).
Death, in Venice, has a history as picturesque as
anything else in this strangest and most alluring ofcities. In the Middle Ages, the rich were buried in (^) »
B
A SERIES OF BLACK CONCRETE
COLONNADES IN ONE OF
THE NEW COURTYARDS, WHICH
ARE ALL LINED WITH ROWS
OF BURIAL RECESSES
Architecture
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