The book by French architect Léa Namer is an event. First by its subject, the Sexto Panteon, a colossal underground necropolis built in Buenos Aires between 1949 and 1966 by a forgotten architect, Itala Fulvia Villa (1931-91). A pioneer of South American modernism, she imagined a brutalist underground structure, a unique vertical concrete cemetery-park.
The Argentine photographer Federico Cairoli, who puts it here in images, was able to capture the strangeness and beauty of this place inhabited by the dead as well as the living. It makes the landscape dimension significant and the underneath, a labyrinth where perspectives marked by the roughness of the concrete open up, is impressive. The whole is bathed in a crushed light where silhouettes sometimes emerge, reminding us that the necropolis has its uses. It is also a fascinating investigative story, that of the author, who, speaking to Itala Fulvia Villa – she says “you” to her – traces the architectural and emotional shock she received during her discovery fortuitousness of Sexto Panteon and his dive into the past, in search of scattered archives and witnesses. A feminist rereading of history, this sensitive, almost existential approach is accompanied by a text by the academic Ana Maria Léon, one of the first people to be interested in the architect. The only downside is the graphic choice of having colorized the archive documents, sometimes rendered illegible, and which would have benefited from revealing their naked truth, that of a found Itala Fulvia Villa.
