Architects: Aldo Rossi.
Location:  Modena, Italy.
Year: 1971.
Photographs: cosmicinspirocloud.

The unfinished San Cataldo Cemetery by Aldo Rossi is often thought of as one of the first and most significant Postmodern structures. It consists of a conical tower designating a collective tomb and a cube-shaped ossuary for holding remains. The perimeter structures that enclose the courtyard have buildings with steely blue roofs, while the ossuary is covered in render that is terracotta in colour. Rossi was born in Milan in 1931 and attended the polytechnic university there to study architecture. He contributed papers on urban philosophy as well as articles about architecture for the Italian journal Casabella.

Aldo Rossi’s plan to enlarge the neoclassical San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena is his first endeavour to incorporate postmodern principles and aesthetics. The design, which was completed in two phases between 1971–1976 and 1980–1980, makes use of the nearby Neoclassical cemetery’s features in a way that Modernism would have disapproved of. According to Rossi’s plans for the cemetery, there will be triangular, square, and round structures that mimic building blocks for kids, and the metal staircases that go up and down the oss’s walls will look like the Italian board game Gioco dell’Ocha.

The orange facade of the ossuary, which serves as the focal point of the cemetery grounds, is punctured by rows of equally sized windows and openings. A network of metal staircases leads to this skeletal building, which is a city for the dead and has no windows, doors, or a roof. The peripheral buildings’ earthy facades and steely blue roofs differ from the austere grey concrete that Modernists favoured in earlier decades. Rossi’s structures have the playful historical allusions typical of postmodernism, but also in their use of forms has a universal, haunting quality. Aldo Rossi’s most important project is incomplete due to his death in 1997.