From the Ground Up is a series on Archinect focused on discovering the early stages & signs of history's most prolific architects. Starting from the beginning allows us to understand the long journey architecture takes in even the formative of hands and often, surprising shifts that occur in its journey. These early projects grant us a glimpse into the early, naive, ambitious and at points rough edges of soon to be architectural masters.

In this installment we look at Aldo Rossi and his San Cataldo Cemetery. While not his first project under his own name, it would become the project tied to the progression and growth of his career and one of his largest impacts on the discipline as a whole. 

He has come synonymous with critical, theoretical, disciplinary and literary standards within our world. His objects, words and images have become references for endless careers and movements and yet, the project he is most known for is one that represents the end of careers and the end of traditional movements. Death.

Aldo Rossi's unfinished San Cataldo Cemetery in Modena, Italy, is considered one of the first and most critical Postmodern buildings. At the center of the proposal sits the object of attention for this excursion. Here we find the focal point of his design, a cube-shaped ossuary for housing remains and a conical tower that marks a communal grave. Set within a courtyard on the outskirts of Modena, the ossuary is covered in soft terracotta styled render, while the perimeter buildings that enclose the courtyard feature steely blue roofs.

At this time in his career, Rossi was both working towards housing projects and starting to explore the conceptual and philosophical aspirations for his architectural investigations along with those of the discipline at large.  

Rossi designed the Cemetery of San Cataldo for a 1971 competition that called for an extension to the existing nineteenth-century Costa Cemetery. This geometric twin is one that is traditionally exempted from drawings and records but is what gave the main formation and bounds to Rossi's proposal. Employing conventions of perspective developed in the fifteenth century, Rossi uses an aerial view to give a sense of the cemetery in both plan and elevation. One enters this wall-enclosed space through a gate opposite what seems to be an abandoned house, a cubic structure designed as a collective or nondenominational temple to be used for funeral, religious, or civil ceremonies. 

As one walks along the central axis, you are positioned and forced through successive rectangular structures, ribbed ossuaries that rise in height as they diminish in length. The journey towards death itself is punctuated by a cone-shaped smokestack monumentalizing a communal grave for the unknown, and referencing the industrial landscape beyond. 

Rossi uses the power of the narrative of death, the idea of its definite arrival as a tool of both architectural investigation and a symbol of architecture's limits. 

Rossi's design is rooted in an Enlightenment typology of the cemetery as a walled structure set on the outskirts of town. It is built simultaneously in the mind and in the built realm. It not only recalls the adjacent Costa Cemetery but, as Rossi says, "complies with the image of a cemetery that everyone has." A structure without a roof, it is a deserted building intended for those who no longer need the protection of shelter-a house for the dead in which life and death exist as a continuum within the collective memory. Rossi uses the power of the narrative of death, the idea of its definite arrival as a tool of both architectural investigation and as a symbol of architecture's limits. 

Through his use of aerial perspective, elemental form, and color, Rossi constructs a visual passage through the drawing that corresponds to the journey through the cemetery. Shadows stem from a particular light source yet reference no particular time of day. Shadows lie in order to delay the passing of time and the coming of death. Perspective, traditionally universalizing, is colored with a Northern Italian palette and draws our eye not back into space but rather up the page. Like the cemetery itself, the drawing presents a road toward abandonment in which time seems to stand still. 

A masterful expression of Aldo Rossi's the cemetery remains a public building with the necessary clarity and rationality of the paths with the right utilization of the terrain.

To think that such a project might not have happened if Rossi had not come so close to death himself in the weeks leading up to the submission is truly remarkable. Rossi had instead been working towards the Centre George Pompidou competition, but a serious car accident just weeks before the deadline hospitalized Rossi and thus made his bid for the project impossible to complete.

This coming so close to death caused Rossi to rethink his tendencies and desires of his own work and instead launched him into the force that he was to become. While this may not be the first of Rossi's projects, it would become a main aspect of the Rossi that we know and revere today.