A Landscape of Memory: From the Vajont Tragedy to the Architecture of Remembrance. Glauco Gresleri and the Cemeteries in Erto a Monte and Ponte Giulio

Abstract

If "landscapes are cultural facts", as written by Marc Augé, the relationship between funerary landscape and cultural identity is a vital storage of knowledge. With this premise, this paper focuses on Glauco Gresleri's contribution to the definition of a landscape of memory after the Vajont disaster. In the places disfigured by the events of 1963 a group of young architects (Gianni Avon, Francesco Tentori and Marco Zanuso for the cemetery of Longarone, Glauco Gresleri and Silvano Varnier for the cemeteries of Ponte Giulio and Erto a Monte) designed the necessary funerary installations. This operation was charged with an evident symbolic value. It was not just an answer to the functional emergency, but an opportunity to reconstruct the identity of places that were by then unrecognizable.

In this context Gresleri proposed the architectural project as a civil commitment, able to reread, with sensitivity, the faint traces still present in the places devastated by the catastrophe. If today’s administrations are usually distracted by mere numbers and satisfied by the functional response to the needs of dwelling, these cemeteries show their relevance by linking their role to the landscape itself, recovering images, dimensions, materials rooted in local traditions, respectful of the character of the places and of the forms of territory.