Spain, like Italy, maintains a most distinguished tradition of tombbuilding, but in many places it is becoming eroded by what Manuel Clavel Rojo calls a ‘kitch-esque style’, with a language composed of PVC door and window frames and bathroom tiles ornamented by plastic flowers and musical angels. So when he was asked to make a family mausoleum in the little La Alberca cemetery in a pine forest on the edge of Murcia in south-east Spain, Rojo was determined to return dignity and simplicity to the rites of burial and mourning. Yet he did not want to fall into what he considers to be the trap of wistful Classicism like Loos and Aalto with their broken column grave stones. The Murcia tomb is orthogonal, with no references to history; it speaks through light, space and materials. It is made of slate and glass with a big wooden door, and is fronted by a simple rusted steel cross. Built on a slope, the tomb is designed to enhance the vertical dimension of the entrance sequence that rises from a massive slate base that emerges from the hillside in rather the way that Peter Zumthor’s thermal bath protrudes geologically from its Alpine incline at Vals.
