An architectural elegy to the loss of Bottonuto: How should we memorialise the lost?

The thesis investigates ways to remember, forget and monumentalise loss. It challenges Rossian classification of monuments, proposing two additional classes. Rossi (1966) divided monuments into propelling and pathological. I argue that there are two more types of monuments: ruinous monuments (monuments of decay) and lost monuments (or the ghosts): monuments whose form has been completely lost, but whose memory is kept alive by the mourners (be it the people or the city).

Having identified the former class I set myself a goal: resurrect the form a lost monuments in the hope that once the city mourns their death, it can heal and move on. After discovering such a monument in Milan, I began investigating its disappearance. Bottonuto was an ancient neighborhood that was completely destroyed in the 20th C. Subject to a modernist project under Mussolini’s leadership, the area was completely demolished in hope to improve the transportation system of Milan and allow the fast growing city to capitalize on the area. Bottontuo was replaced with a “modernist heaven” called Piazza Diaz, leaving behind the partially demolished wall of the San Giovanni in Conca Church in the middle of a very

The thesis designs a memorial for San Giovanni in Conca Church and Bottonuto, in hope that by remembering the Church for its propelling nature, the city can mourn its loss and the “modernist heaven” that took its place together with the proposed memorial can become propelling monuments themselves. In doing so, I began by studying Freud’s theory on Mourning (1917) and understanding the function of memorials not only in architecture and art, but also in literature. In 1985 Sacks compares Freud's theory of mourning to the elegy, an epic poem that poets dedicate to the dead. According to Sacks, the elegy is the literary expression of Freudian mourning. While Freud's primary focus was on finding human substitutes for the dead, Sacks demonstrates how cultural fictions perform the same substitutive purpose. Sacks' research suggests that poets and mourners found solace in fictions that transcend and survive death and reveals how the elegy itself arises as a consoling substitute for the lost one. Hence, potentially, an architectural elegy could have a similar effect on the city. Following the structure of the poem, the thesis proposes a three-part methodology to design the memorial.

The elegy is divided into three sections: lamentation, hyper remembrance, and consolation. Each part is supposed to allow the poet/the mourner to grieve, recall, and forget their loss. The tree can be translated into architecture through casting: 1. Lamentation (the pain of the mourner) can be “achitectified” by casting the trace left by the monument on the city. 2. Hyper-remembrance (the violent recalling of the dead) can be embodied through casting the negative space of the lost monument. 3. Consolation can be expressed in form by casting the exterior of the monument, the current context, meaning the modernist heaven.