Dignity in death: imaginative understanding of materials makes this tomb a fitting set for rites of passage

Architectural Review, The, August, 2004

Spain, like Italy, maintains a most distinguished tradition of tomb-building, but in many places it is becoming eroded by what Manuel Clavel Rojo calls a 'kitch-esque style', with a language composed of PVC door and window frames and bathroom tiles ornamented by plastic flowers and musical angels.

So when he was asked to make a family mausoleum in the little La Alberca cemetery in a pine forest on the edge of Murcia in south-east Spain, Rojo was determined to return dignity and simplicity to the rites of burial and mourning. Yet he did not want to fall into what he considers to be the trap of wistful Classicism like Loos and Aalto with their broken column grave stones. The Murcia tomb is orthogonal, with no references to history; it speaks through light, space and materials. It is made of slate and glass with a big wooden door, and is fronted by a simple rusted steel cross. Built on a slope, the tomb is designed to enhance the vertical dimension of the entrance sequence that rises from a massive slate base that emerges from the hillside in rather the way that Peter Zumthor's thermal bath protrudes geologically from its Alpine incline at Vals (AR August 1997).

The tomb chamber is entered at the lower level through a narrow, 3.6m high door of solid wenge wood which, once opened, reveals a shaft of luminance falling from the tall translucent panel that rises vertically in the upper part of the entrance sequence. The panel is made of thick sheets of glass laid horizontally on top of each other with slightly ragged edges that, externally, give the glass a texture that relates to the surrounding slate blocks. Looking up from the doorway, an image of the metal cross is discernible through the translucent plane, while its shadow is thrown on the thick glass when the sun is in the right direction.

Rojo calls the platform on top of the slate block 'an altar where burial occurs'. It is of travertine, penetrated by two slots. One is for the internment ritual, in which the coffin is lowered down into the tomb-chamber, while the actual insertion of the remains into their niche is hidden from above. This opening is closed by a solid slab of Pakistani onyx, which can be slid in and out of position.

A shallow pool with a glass base is formed in the other slot in the travertine. Here, water is continuously in motion, gently pouring from a smooth slot. So the light that passes through the pool to the underground chamber flickers, in contrast to the more constant luminance from the onyx slab and the translucent vertical glass panel. In daytime, the space is filled with constantly changing light, a reminder of the evanescent nature of life in the constant, calm presence of death. E. M.

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