From stone to concrete: The new funeral architecture. The case of the New Cementery of Igualada

Abstract

The article develops a comparison between two modalities of urban cemeteries located in Igualada. Through their architecture, form and the organization of space, the aim is to clarify the transcendence that derives from the meaning that the population of Igualada, gives to death, since they are used to represent the hypothetical afterlife or the community of the dead in a nineteenth-century burial site. Due to the lack of room for new burials, the inhabitants of this
Catalan city in the province of Barcelona, have no other alternative than to bury their dead in a contemporary cemetery, the New Cemetery. Its main feature is the absence of any explicit funerary symbolism for the sake of a new transcendence before the fact of dying.
Moreover, its architecture does not take into account how its users mean and use this essential urban infrastructure. The so-called signature architecture that defines and configures the cemetery forces them to carry out constant appropriations to rehabilitate the use value of the space and its significance as the essence of the architectural work.