July 12, 2024 Ι Architect’s Newspaper
In letters from Argentina’s Sociedad Central de Arquitectos in the 1930s, Itala Fulvia Villa, only the sixth Argentine woman architect, was addressed as “Senorita Arquitecto,” as if the letter writers feared setting a precedent with the feminine gendered form of “architect” in Spanish. They had little reason to fear on one front: In the history of architecture, there was no precedent for Villa and her greatest work. This archival gem comes from a book that’s a bit short of them, yet manages to craft a narrative around its author’s personal search for Villa, delivering a convincing portrait of a feloniously understudied designer and her epochal work of equally overlooked Latin American modernism.
Chacarita Moderna: The Brutalist Necropolis of Buenos Aires by Léa Namer, a French artist and architect, focuses on Villa’s 1958 Sexto Panteon, her section of the Chacarita Cemetery. Namer’s Graham Foundation– funded book arrives with enough force to rebalance historic appraisals of modernism’s arrival in Latin America and the development of the Brutalist idiom.
Because of the lack of archival materials about the cemetery, Namer’s journey becomes the most salient element of the book, a project that was a decade in the making. Its first chapter is a letter from Namer to Villa about her interest and obsession. This section is alternately filled with painstaking historical record gumshoeing from library to aged colleague to exhibition hall, sprinkled with equally sentimental and melancholy recollections of Namer shuffling her life between Europe and Argentina. Her father, who provided Namer’s familial connection to Argentina (he grew up in nearby Uruguay), died during her research, and she dedicated the book to him. The text occasionally gets bogged down in the details of its own production, but Namer works hard to communicate the sense of awe that overwhelms her at Sexto Panteon.
Situated in a cemetery with 19th-century origins, Sexto Panteon is the ancient catacomb of a future civilization, made more surreal by the fact that it belongs to our past. It’s replete with mythological references to the underworld, via Dante, and, unequivocally, Piranesi.
The cemetery consists of two levels of funerary galleries below the ground plane, where a series of plazas and plantings are interrupted by rectilinear gashes revealing the catacombs below. These strata cross sections hint that you are very much on top of a great necropolis, unsettling your trust in solid ground beneath you. Photographed from above, Sexto Panteon becomes a pure cubist abstraction—crosscutting paths, incisions of shade, and witty asymmetry. Namer describes her first trip there as totally enthralling and alienating, quoting Jorge Luis Borges: “The gods that built this place were mad.”
Brise-soleils, sculptural artworks, and bouquets of flowers affixed to mausoleum walls humanize the cemetery’s uniform material and chromatic palette. Amid this formal and material plan, details are subtly integrated and omnipresent, like the ventilation exhausts that peek above ground in neat rows, foregrounded above squiggle-shaped platforms.
Sexto Panteon was assumed to be the work of Clorindo Testa, one of Argentina’s best-known modernists. He’s celebrated for his Brutalist icon Bank of London, and he did design nine sculptural entry pavilions for the cemetery. But further archival inspection of a 1961 architecture magazine revealed that the entire operation was Villa’s, and returning this text to its true author is Namer’s chief victory. One of the only other contemporary architects and academics to know of Villa was Ana María León, and she was enlisted for a chapter of the book as well.
Villa graduated from architecture school at the University of Buenos Aires in 1935 and worked with Corbusier on his Buenos Aires plan. She absorbed his rationalizing ethos and love of sculpted concrete, though so much of Sexto Panteon seems bracingly sui generis for the mid-1950s. (The only other conclusive influence on Sexto Panteon that Namer could trace are the ziggurats of Mexico.)
Her male colleagues often overshadowed her, though Villa internalized the progressive social ideology of modernism better than her peers. She was collaborative and prone to sharing credit, while her male colleagues were not—at least when it came to her. She was often retroactively excised from the Sexto Panteon’s historic record, though it was her overall vision and she ran the team. When she completed the project in 1958, women had only been allowed to vote in Argentina for 11 years. Not much of her other work remains today.
A population boom in Buenos Aires prompted the need for more (and better organized) funerary space, so modernism’s grid-based rationality and efficiency were co-opted for this city of the dead. But the book is also a record of Namer’s uncertain place in between Sexto Panteon’s rigidly ordered formal power and her trepidation over what this does to the intimate journey of grief. This intriguing tension deserves more exploration than it got. “It surfaced some of my doubts regarding Modern architecture’s capacity to integrate the complex individuality of the human being,” Namer writes. “Designing a collective resting place is a delicate art, and given my perspective on Modern architectural production, I often noticed how the search for rationalization could generate a feeling of violence.”
“For me, it’s too brutal,” she writes. “I wouldn’t like to rest there.”
But it’s a Brutalism that’s equitably, and thus admirably, applied. Namer’s book is most self-assured when it points out that there are no grand monuments to single individuals at Sexto Panteon; everyone is equally sublimated in this vast system of afterlife urbanism. “The moments of monumentality are reserved for the grand entrances and staircases connecting the depths with the sky above,” wrote León in her chapter. “All are equally called upon to salvation and revival.” The lack of monumental hierarchy is echoed by the choice to feature cuidadores in the book’s final chapter, the workers who labor to maintain tombs of the deceased.
Namer describes Sexto Panteon as being “on the cusp between architecture and urban planning,” and photos by Federico Cairolimasterfully illustrate the project as a type of urbanism: catacomb galleries and corridors as tightly and intimately proportioned as a village high street. “She was more of an urbanist than an architect,” writes Namer. “It’s not a cemetery, it’s a necropolis in the proper sense of ‘necropolis.’”
Throughout her career, Villa mostly focused on public works, true to her early career mandate of remaking the world with progressive public infrastructure. None of her early colleagues ever made a public impact comparable to Sexto Panteon, part of the largest cemetery in the nation.
Due to archival dearth, the book doesn’t tell us much about how the cemetery was perceived when it was new. (“Everything is a mess,” Namer said, a testament to lurching stumbles from democracy to dictatorship and the subsequent administrative churn.) There’s also little formal description of what is a very dense, visual text. Chacarita Moderna is Namer’s journey, and moving the camera lens away from the primeval edifice itself often leaves the reader with a bit of mystery and magic. And that’s OK. Villa’s unearthing from architectural history’s own silent necropolis is cause for celebration and a prompt for more storytelling. True to form, Namer is currently studying documentary film.