San Michele Cemetery

After nearly 200 years of internment, San Michele Cemetery was running out of space, leading to a design competition in 1998, won by David Chipperfield Architects. Stemmed from the increasingly outer-facing municipal character that the designers felt strongly contrasted to its romantic interior, the design intent behind Chipperfield’s extension for the cemetery island, was aimed at restoring some of the original monumental qualities of the site, but with a greater emphasis on interiority and intimacy. This interiority and intimacy were achieved through the utilization of enclosing rectangular cloistered courtyard, with walls that are blind on the exterior, but lined with burial recesses on the interior.

The conditions of the San Michele cemetery are quite unique in that the entire cemetery-designated island is in the Venetian lagoon. For this project, I focused on the second phase of the project, which most notably saw the 2017 addition of the Courtyard of the Three Archangels. More specifically, I studied the organizational arrangement of the courtyard typology, which ultimately creates a feeling of separate spaces, differentiating in sizes, yet are interconnected with sharing similar characteristics and materiality. My analysis investigated how the walls (clad in basalt and pietra d’Istria) and interior colonnades (formed from a dark grey in-situ exposed concrete) were used to draw the built form together, along with the tombs and landscape, in order to create a sense of enclosure and solidarity.