Brion-Vega Cemetery in Carlo Scarpa

We arrived at the Brion-Vega Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa on an overcast rainy day. The cemetery is located outside in San Vito d’Altivole, Italy. While we all looked like a bunch of drowned rats from the rain, we could not help but be drawn to the collection of details Scarpa has linked into a cemetery. Starting from the entrygate (click here to see a video) every corner, door, and piece of concrete is carefully sculpted. It is through these details that the design takes shape. The cemetery was constructed beginning in 1970 and was completed in 1972. Carlo Scarpa is buried in the cemetery tucked behind several folding concrete walls. Carlo Scarpa explained his work, "I would like to explain the Tomba Brion...I consider this work, if you permit me, to be rather good and which will get better over time. I have tried to put some poetic imagination into it, though not in order to create poetic architecture but to make a certain kind of architecture that could emanate a sense of formal poetry.... The place for the dead is a garden.... I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way; and further what meaning there was in death, in the ephemerality of life—other than these shoe-boxes."

Jennie West