"DOMUS ANIMAE"
The new columbarium is located in the monumental cemetery of Pavia and takes the form of a "domus", with a central courtyard, like many of the existing buildings of Pavia. A house for souls, a "domus animae".
The new temple occupies the entire plot with a square volume of concrete that stands silently in the garden, reserving the leading role to the existing galleries and the surrounding vegetation.
Its external neutrality must be interpreted on the one hand by the respect for the built and on the other side towards the coherence of its use as container where the interior is the most important and on the outside only the blind wall is shown as in any cemetery. The access is produced by the terraced portico which as an inevitable transition space in buildings of this nature, allows us to gradually leave the outside world to enter the sacred space.
It proposes a place where to offer to the mortal remains the rest they deserve in a space that should propitiate the radical solitude of the individuals before the mystery and the transcendence of the death. A space built with light, not immediate but diffuse and smooth, which creates an atmosphere that distances us from the outside world and from memory, we associate the sacred.
It creates an essential space, which is defined by a perimeter wall that envelops us levitating over a moat of light and a central pond illuminated by a large lantern hung from the ceiling. All supported by four circular pillars. The earth floor emphasizes the essentiality of space.
The perimeter moat from which light springs creates the insurmountable distance between the world of the living and the world of the dead while the large lantern suspended above the pond with water lilies allows us a relationship with the outside, with life and hope.
The walls suspended in the emptiness symbolize the state obtained by the incineration of the bodies, in transit to eternity, already free, definitely of the earth.
The project proposes a reinterpretation of the columbarium of the Roman time in an attempt to move away from the current image of the columbarium as small-scale niches posing a more archaic and essential image closer to the sacred
