Modena Cemetery

The design of the Modena cemetery is definitely heavily influenced by religion. Rossi’s intentions of establishing architecture as an authority are very apparent, and his tools of accomplishing this idea are certainly successful. Moneo, in his essay, claimed that Rossi had to adopt an elusive relation to broader urban technologies to protect the authority of architecture in the post-war city. To me, it seemed that Moneo was seeking the grounds to support Rossi, but the evidence of the contemporary city - the late 20th Century metropolis -made Rossi's propositions difficult to accept without stipulation.

Moneo's essay began a procedure of reconciling Rossi's theory and practice of architecture within a broader and ultimately more self-sustaining field, in this case the post-war city of Western Europe and the United States. In addressing the self-sustaining role of the metropolis itself, Moneo seemed reluctant to accept a project of architectural autonomy, and instead came close to proposing the autonomy of the metropolis as a monetary, governmental and power-laden instrument. In Rossi's work, architecture offered what Moneo termed a "fleeting glimpse" of the city achieved in the suspension of analytic technique. Architecture as memory, as time-image, allowed Rossi to conceive of architecture as permanent, limited and distinct, yet also relieved it of its relative and synthetic unity.