A new book sheds light on the architectural history of the Itala Fulvia Villa

Chacarita Moderna: The brutalist necropolis of Buenos Aires by Léa Namer | Building books | $38

In letters from the Argentine 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 were afraid of setting a precedent for the feminine form of “architect” in Spanish. In one respect, they had little reason to fear: there was no precedent in the history of architecture for Villa and her greatest work. This archival gem comes from a book that, while not quite as good as Villa, still builds a narrative around the author’s personal search for Villa, providing a compelling portrait of a criminally underrated 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 book, funded by the Graham Foundation, is powerful enough to rebalance historical assessments of the arrival of modernism in Latin America and the development of the Brutalist style.

Since there are no archival materials on the cemetery, Namer’s journey becomes the most salient element of the book, a project a decade in the making. The first chapter is a letter from Namer to Villa about her interest and obsession. This section is alternately filled with meticulous historical research from the library to an old colleague to the exhibition hall, peppered with memories as sentimental as they are melancholy of Namer’s life between Europe and Argentina. Her father, who established Namer’s family connection to Argentina (he grew up in nearby Uruguay), died during her research, and she dedicated the book to him. The text occasionally gets lost in the details of its own creation, but Namer tries hard to convey the sense of awe that overwhelms her at Sexto Panteon.

Set in a 19th-century cemetery, Sexto Panteon is the ancient catacomb of a future civilization, all the more surreal because it belongs to our past. It is full of mythological references to the underworld, to Dante and, definitely, to Piranesi.

The cemetery consists of two levels of burial galleries below ground level, where a series of plazas and plantings are interrupted by linear incisions that reveal the catacombs below. These layered cross-sections suggest you are on top of a large necropolis, shaking your faith in the solid ground beneath you. Photographed from above, Sexto Panteon becomes a pure cubist abstraction – intersecting paths, incisions of shadow and witty asymmetry. Namer describes her first trip there as utterly captivating and alienating, quoting Jorge Luis Borges: “The gods who built this place were mad.”

Brise-soleils, sculptural artworks, and bouquets of flowers attached to the mausoleum’s walls add a human touch to the cemetery’s uniform material and color palette. Amid this formal and material plan, details are subtly integrated and omnipresent, such as the ventilation openings that rise above the ground in neat rows and stand above scrolling platforms in the foreground.

Sexto Panteon was thought to be the work of Clorindo Testa, one of Argentina’s most prominent modernists. He is known for his brutalist landmark Bank of London and designed nine sculptural entrance pavilions for the cemetery. But a closer examination of the archives of an architectural magazine from 1961 revealed that Villa was responsible for the entire work. Returning this text to its true author is Namer’s greatest achievement. One of the few other contemporary architects and academics who knew Villa was Ana María León, and she was also enlisted for a chapter in the book.

Villa graduated in architecture from the University of Buenos Aires in 1935 and worked with Corbusier on his Buenos Aires plan. She adopted his rationalist ethos and his love of concrete sculpture, although much of Sexto Panteon seems refreshingly idiosyncratic for the mid-1950s. (The only other conclusive influence on Sexto Panteon that Namer could identify are the ziggurats of Mexico.)

Her male colleagues were often overshadowed, although Villa internalized the progressive social ideology of modernism better than her peers. She was collaborative and happy to share credit, while her male colleagues did not—at least when it came to her. She was often retroactively erased from the historical record of the Sexto Panteon, even though it was her overall vision and she led the team. When she completed the project in 1958, women in Argentina had only been allowed to vote for 11 years. Not much of her other work remains today.

A population boom in Buenos Aires necessitated more (and better organized) burial spaces, so the grid-based rationality and efficiency of modernism were adopted for this city of the dead. But the book is also an account of Namer’s uncertain position between Sexto Panteon’s strictly ordered formal power and her trepidation about what this does to the intimate journey of mourning. This fascinating tension deserves a more detailed exploration than it has been. “It raised some of my doubts about the ability of modern architecture 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 have often been struck by how the search for rationalization can create a sense of violence.”

“It’s too brutal for me,” she writes. “I don’t want to rest there.”

But it is a brutalism that is applied justly and therefore admirably. Namer’s book is at its most confident when it points out that there are no great monuments to single individuals in Sexto Panteon; everyone is equally sublimated in this vast system of otherworldly urbanism. “The moments of monumentality are reserved for the great entrances and staircases that connect the depths with the sky above,” León wrote in her chapter. “All are equally called to redemption and revival.” The lack of a monumental hierarchy is reflected in the decision to supervisor The last chapter of the book is about the workers who struggle to maintain the graves of the deceased.

Namer describes Sexto Panteon as a “threshold between architecture and urban planning,” and photographs by Federico Cairoli masterfully illustrate the project as a kind of urbanism: catacomb galleries and corridors as narrow and intimately proportioned as a village main street. “She was more of an urban planner than an architect,” writes Namer. “It is not a cemetery, it is a necropolis in the true sense of ‘necropolis.'”

Throughout her career, Villa focused primarily on public works, true to her early career goal of remaking the world with advanced public infrastructure. None of her early colleagues ever had a public impact comparable to Sexto Panteon, part of the largest cemetery in the country.

Because of its limited archival capacity, the book does not tell us much about how the cemetery was perceived when it was new (“Everything is chaos,” said Namer, a testament to the bumpy transition from democracy to dictatorship and the administrative upheaval that followed). There is also little formal description of the very dense, visual text. Chacarita Moderna is Namer’s journey, and moving the camera lens away from the ancient structure often leaves the reader with a sense of mystery and magic. And that’s OK. Villa’s excavations from the silent necropolis of architectural history are a cause for celebration and an impetus for more stories. True to his reputation, Namer is currently studying documentary film.

Zach Mortice is a Chicago-based design critic and journalist who focuses on the intersection of architecture and landscape architecture and public policy.