Aldo Rossi, Cemetery of San Cataldo, Modena 1971. 'On a visit to Aldo Rossi’s morbid pomo masterpiece in Modena, Diogo Seixas Lopes, one of the chief curators of the 4th Lisbon Architecture Triennale in 2016, and the fine art photographer Nuno Cera found beauty in the eye of the abyss. The Cemetery of San Cataldo in Modena, Italy is a consummate masterpiece by the Italian architect Aldo Rossi (1931-1997). Designed in tandem with his former pupil Gianni Braghieri, it resulted from a public competition organised in 1971 by the municipality of Modena. The brief called for an expansion of the Costa Cemetery, a monumental funerary complex constructed by Cesare Costa in 1876. Under the motto of “L’azzurro del cielo” – the title of a rather gruesome novel by Georges Bataille set at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War – Rossi and Braghieri proposed to duplicate the basic outline of the original cemetery and trace out an “evil twin”. While the Costa Cemetery relies on the civic qualities of neoclassical architecture to face the collective experience of death, San Cataldo offers no comfort or solace in its stark appearance: a kind of postwar social housing unit for the deceased. In this sense, the project gazes at the abyss of annihilation and the abyss gazes back at us. More: uncube Photo 'City of the Dead' by Thomas Nemeskeri. Flickr