San Piero a Grado Cemetery, Pisa

Description

The extension of the San Piero a Grado Cemetery in Pisa represents the last of a series of cemetery projects developed within the Urban Projects Office of the Municipality of Pisa. The intervention explores the control of compositional figures and their relationship with the expressive possibilities of the adopted materials. A long curved brick wall emerges from the flat rural landscape and clearly defines the northern boundary of the new cemetery. In plan, the wall describes a wide arc of a circle that encloses a sequence of linear elements — ossuaries, private chapels and columbarium enclosures — slightly shifted and separated in order to articulate a complex relationship between solids and voids. These volumes generate a succession of internal courts, transitional spaces and places of gathering, each characterized by a different spatial condition. Some courts accommodate horizontal burials set flush with the paving surface, recalling the burial tradition of the Campo Santo Monumentale of Pisa, while others function primarily as spaces of circulation and quiet passage. Two visual focal points organize the spatial sequence: the cylindrical volume containing the public services, which terminates the entrance building, and the octagonal chapel located along the axis of one of the internal paths. The project reinterprets traditional Pisan building practices through a contemporary architectural language. The masonry walls are constructed with double brick layers filled with concrete, while steel and glass elements define the lighter components of the architecture, such as roofs, gates and structural frames. The use of brick responds both to the construction tradition of the city and to the desire to achieve a colour close to that of the surrounding soil and in dialogue with the masonry of the nearby Romanesque basilica of San Piero a Grado. The external wall, articulated by subtle variations in the laying of the bricks and crowned by a projecting cornice, establishes a strong architectural boundary while allowing the dark crowns of the cypress trees to emerge beyond it. The design is guided from the outset by archaeological and structural constraints. Excavations revealed the long, narrow stone foundations of the demolished medieval building that once closed the square on the east; instead of erasing them with a deep modern basement, the project builds directly on these traces, as would have been done in the past. To the north and south, the surviving brick and stone walls are carefully restored and completed up to the height indicated by the scars on the party walls, with reconstructed vaults and new timber beams set into the original stone pockets. The result is a three-sided court whose perimeter is largely determined by existing masonry. Within this frame, the new construction adopts thick brick cavity walls, made of two outer skins in solid brick with reinforced-concrete infill, echoing the traditional muro a sacco while accommodating modern services. Towards the narrow streets the elevations appear as long, almost blind walls, interrupted only by deep vertical cuts and triple-height loggias that lead to the internal piazza and offer oblique views of the church apse. The recessed metal windows, pulled back from the facade to create small balcony pockets, underline the thickness of the wall and contribute to the sense of the building as a hollowed-out mass, closer to a contemporary ruin than to a thinly clad object. Programmatically, the ground floor is occupied by a continuous strip of commercial spaces, subdivided by slender iron-and-glass diaphragms that allow complete visual permeability from one side of the block to the other. Above, a series of modestly sized apartments with different layouts are arranged around the square, taking advantage of cross-ventilation, balconies and long diagonal views. Internal partitions in larch boards, together with the metal and glass elements, are clearly legible as lightweight, potentially reversible components set against the permanence of the masonry shell. The extremely long construction process – with work starting in 1985 after several project variants and continuing, in phases, into the early 2000s – is not an accident but part of the project’s character. The design is repeatedly refined during the works, as new information emerges from the fabric and as the team tests details at 1:20 and 1:1 on site. Even in its still partly unfinished state, especially along the southern front and the square, San Michele in Borgo demonstrates a precise attitude: to work with the constraints and traces of the historic city, using a limited palette of durable materials and a measured formal language so that the new construction can age with its surroundings and remain open to future, non-superficial transformations.