The Brion tomb is not a tomb

Photo: Viaggiamocela, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The Brion tomb is not a tomb. It is a two-thousand-square-meter L-shaped garden wrapped around the back of the municipal cemetery of San Vito d'Altivole, a small farming town in the Veneto about forty minutes north of Venice, and inside that garden there are water, concrete, grass, cypresses, a chapel, a pavilion that floats on a reflecting pool, a pair of sarcophagi that lean toward each other under a low arched shelter, and one standing-up grave in a corner that belongs to the architect. I have not been to any of it. I have been reading about it for about two weeks.

The architect is Carlo Scarpa. The family is the Brion family. Giuseppe Brion co-founded the Italian electronics company Brionvega in 1945. His widow Onorina Tomasin-Brion commissioned the tomb in 1969, the year after Giuseppe died. Scarpa worked on it from 1968 until his own death in 1978. He died in Sendai, in northeast Japan, after falling down a flight of concrete stairs. He was buried, per his wishes, standing up, wrapped in linen, in the corner of the tomb he had built for someone else.

That is the scaffolding. Every word in it is in the Wikipedia article or the Italian heritage fund's documentation and I have taken pains to get the details right, because the credibility of the piece rests on the claim in its first sentence being defensible, and the claim in its first sentence is that the building is not what its name says it is.

What the Brions made

You probably know what Brionvega made even if you do not know you know. The Cubo radio, the small black-and-chrome transistor set that unfolds like a hinged box, designed by Marco Zanuso and Richard Sapper in 1963, is a permanent installation in the design collections of MoMA and the Triennale in Milan and about eight other museums. The Algol television, the portable one with the angled screen tilted slightly upward as if it were looking at the viewer, is from 1964. The RR 126, the 1966 radiogram that resembled a small animal with a pair of cubic speakers for ears, is from the Castiglioni brothers. These are the objects. They are the reason Brionvega exists in the design canon at all. Giuseppe Brion was the manufacturer who made them possible — he was not, himself, a designer — but the company's identity was built on the commissioning of objects that were not quite like any other objects of their year.

When he died in 1968, his widow Onorina commissioned the tomb. She could have commissioned a grave. She commissioned, instead, a walled garden by one of the most important Italian architects of the twentieth century, a man whose entire practice was the commissioning of objects that were not quite like any other objects of their year. The symmetry is probably not an accident. The Brions had spent twenty-three years commissioning things that did not look like the thing they did. They commissioned one more.

Photo: Filippo Poli, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

The pieces of it

The complex has a vocabulary that Scarpa used carefully, and the vocabulary is part of how you read it. The two covered burial spaces where Giuseppe and Onorina lie are called arcosolia, the word for the arched niches carved into the walls of Roman and early Christian catacombs where the dead were placed; their sarcophagi lean toward each other under a single low concrete arch. The small building that floats on the reflecting pool is called the padiglione della meditazione, the pavilion of meditation, and it is shaped as a vesica piscis, the two-circle intersection that Christian symbolism has used to represent the intersection of the divine and the human for about eighteen hundred years. The lawn — the simple rectangle of grass inside the L — is called the prato, which is just the Italian word for lawn, because it is just a lawn. The entry threshold is a set of two intersecting circles cut into a concrete wall, which echoes the vesica piscis of the pavilion at the other end of the site.

Gold tesserae, the small cube-shaped glass tiles of Byzantine mosaics, are set into the concrete at particular moments, and the gold is not decoration. It is a reference to Ravenna and San Marco, to the mosaics that Scarpa, a Venetian, had been looking at for his entire working life. The Wikipedia article describes the complex as “both a meditation on death and an evocation of a particular magical city, Venice,” which is a sentence the article did not need to write but did, and I am grateful it did, because it says the thing I needed to say.

Photo: Viaggiamocela, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

What Scarpa said about it

Scarpa gave an explanation of the project in a lecture that is quoted by more or less everyone who writes about the tomb in Italian: “Il luogo per i morti è un giardino.” The place for the dead is a garden. It is the kind of thing a Venetian architect with a practice full of museum conversions and glass commissions and courtyard restorations would say, and it is also the kind of thing that sounds like a platitude until you look at the two-thousand-square-meter L-shaped garden he made out of the sentence. It is not a platitude in the building. It is the building.

The tomb was, by the time Scarpa died, essentially complete. The only unfinished element, by most accounts, was some of the detail work in the chapel. His grave was added in the corner afterward, per the arrangement he had made with the Brion family, and he lies standing up inside the linen shroud, between the main enclosure and the public cemetery it is attached to, in a transitional piece of ground that is neither the tomb nor the town cemetery but both.

Why it is not a tomb

A tomb, in the normal sense of the word, is a small architectural object that contains the dead and is closed. A grave marker is smaller than that. A mausoleum is the upscale version. The Brion complex is not any of these. The Brion complex is a small village, composed of buildings that the dead family is at one end of, buildings that you walk through, buildings that float on water, buildings that have doors which lock the visitor out of the deepest contemplative space. The pavilion of meditation is accessed by a separate and usually-locked door, because Scarpa did not want the private meditation pavilion to be something a tourist could casually walk into. And then there are the buildings that are there, as far as I can tell, to make the visitor slow down. It is the building as walking tour. The dead are in it, somewhere. The building is about the living.

Scarpa called his burial grounds “a sequence of small pavilions,” which is the description the tomb actually fits. The fact that what he built is conventionally called la tomba is a useful accident of vocabulary. The Italian word contains the ordinary meaning and also the un-ordinary one that Scarpa was reaching for, which is that a grave can be an architectural composition at the scale of a walk, a set of small pavilions you pass between on your way to what you have come to think about. That is, I suspect, what Onorina Tomasin-Brion was paying him for.

If I went

The tomb was donated to the Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano, the Italian environmental and heritage fund, by the Brion heirs in 2022. It is open to the public without an appointment. There is no entrance fee. The restoration was completed in 2021 and the documentation of it is extensive and in Italian. Dune: Part Two filmed there in 2022, which is either a vulgarity or a compliment depending on who you ask — I have not made up my mind, though I lean compliment, because the tomb has always had a certain cinematic patience about it and Villeneuve at least seems to have noticed.

Photo: Viaggiamocela, CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons

If I went I would sit in the grass inside the L, on the prato, and I would try to not take any pictures for the first hour, because the pavilion floating on the reflecting pool is one of the most photographed objects in twentieth-century Italian architecture and my photograph of it would be the ten-thousandth. There is a particular corner of the enclosing wall where Scarpa is buried standing up that I would want to look at for a long time. The gold tesserae in the concrete are supposed to be nearly invisible in full sun and to catch the eye in long shadow. I would want to see the shift. Whether I will ever go to San Vito d'Altivole is a question I have not answered. The train from Venice runs to Castelfranco. Castelfranco is a taxi away. That is most of what I know.