Perhaps many of us are looking forward to the sequel to Dune, Denis Villeneuve’s award-winning sci-fi film. The official premiere was set for November 17, 2023, a year later, and the first scenes were filmed in early July at the Brioni Cemetery: a postmodern masterpiece by leading Venetian architect Carlo Scarpa.

Patrice Vermette (Oscar for Best Production Design for the first Dune) weaves gripping scenes with a deep reading of Frank Herbert’s interstellar novel. The planet Arakis has borrowed footage from the vast sand dunes of Abu Dhabi and the rocky landscapes of Jordan, while Norway, with its rugged coastlines and misty forests, forms Kaladan.

Several spaces have been built in Budapest with references to World War II bunkers, Mayan and Aztec architecture, and Brazilian dystopian modernism.

However, the surprise for design lovers comes from Italy. Built next to the existing municipal cemetery of San Vito d’Altivole, 35 km northwest of Treviso and 60 km north of Venice, Scarpa’s grand opus will be the setting for part of Dune 2. The royal courts of the planet Haitan with the newly arrived Florence Pugh as Princess Irulan (daughter of Christopher Walken – Emperor Saddam IV) or the palaces of the planet Giddy Prime of Baron Harkonnen – Stellan Skarsgård?

Arakis, known as “Dune”, may be a desert planet – the only world where a melange of spices thrives – but Brion’s graveyard is a wetland where the memory of life trumps death. A meadow where the transition from the perishable material world to eternal life takes place “in a bright place, in a green place, in a refreshing place.” In a futuristic and supernatural place.

Built between 1968 and 1978, the private tomb was commissioned by Honorine Thomasin-Brion in memory of her husband Giuseppe Brion, founder and owner of the well-known electronics company Brionvega.

The architect masterfully manages “grief” by sketching “a meditation on death…

From the entrance to the neighboring cemetery, the first thing you see – through a kind of round hole in the concrete – is the garden. vesica piscis is a mathematical figure obtained by the intersection of two discs of the same radius, each centered on the circumference of the other. The intersecting rings are the symbol of the cemetery. They are framed with a copper frame and a mosaic in pink and blue tones and at the same time express infinity – life after death – and the love affair of the Brions.

The architect masterfully manages “grief” by sketching “a meditation on death and a reminder of a magical city: Venice”. Just as Venice haunts Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” – like memories of Marco Polo’s birthplace – so “The Floating City” guides Scarpa’s composition.

Scarpa, born in Galinotati in 1906, with one eye gazing there and the other to the Land of the Rising Sun, where he died after an accident in 1978, illustrates the ritual of Zen gardens through Venetian materiality.

“There are three hidden and enchanted places in Venice. […] One of them is Calle dell’Amor dei Amici, the second is in Ponte delle Maraveze, and the third is Calle dei Marani. When the Venetians get tired of the establishment and its establishments, they go to these three secret places and, opening the doors at the bottom of the courtyards, they go to beautiful places and other enchanting stories. […]. It is enough to open that door in the background to leave and return to the past. Like in fairy tales”, monologues by Corto Maltese in “The Hidden Courtyard of Secrets” by Hugo Pratt.

One of these magical courtyards is the Brion cemetery. Hortus conclusus, a walled garden filled with symbolism. Bathed in light. Flooded water. Place of “heterotopy” according to Foucault. Lyrical and at the same time pompous, it combines utopia with realistic earthly motifs, enhancing Villeneuve’s epic vision. In its center is the “Arcosolium”, a tombstone of the newlyweds – under a mosaic dome. To the right is a meditation booth that opens when you drive a crystal door into the floor. On the other side is a chapel, a copper corner altar under a pyramidal dome with small wooden stepped beams floating on the water.

Adhering to the theoretical infrastructure of modernism, but radically influenced by the Venetian identity, Scarpa places himself on the spectrum of critical localism. Referring to Otto Wagner, Josef Hoffmann, Adolf Loos, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Mies van de Rohe and sincerely acknowledging Paul Valéry, he ignored the populism of neo-traditional architecture, emphasizing topoforms that – out of sight – seduce texture and hearing. In a dialectical relationship to nature, he followed the genius of the place, looking for magic in the materiality of construction as the art of combining materials and details.

“I tried to create poetic architecture”

Uncoated concrete is the canvas on which he molds tradition. Exquisitely stuccoed walls with lacy edges and pleated cutouts reflect lustrous materials and textures that beg to be touched. Oriental ideograms, repetitive decorative motifs, square tiles in colored Murano glass with severe straight lines set into concrete, gilded traces inspired by Byzantine mosaics and cobalt blue in curved socors. Metal doors that open noisily and rotate on hidden shafts. Benches in the middle of the water. Small geometric ponds with water lilies and fish, channels with clear water, climbing plants, ziggurat steps submerged in water, meditative reflections. Irregular openings in closed walls to look through. Embossed ceilings, bright and dark, in evocative chiaroscuro.

Although this is a private project, the cemetery is open to everyone. The garden of death and dreams, it boldly stands as an example of narrative architecture. Scarpa on a two-acre site defines a C-shaped composition in which the buildings/sculptures are events in their own right. It carves non-linear paths with many options, directions, swirls. He designs views, builds perspectives. It alternates between life and death. Recalls chunks of memory collected from small snapshots. It raises the ground of the garden by 75 cm, tilting the “wall” around the perimeter by 60 degrees, so that the pedestrian discovers the images “outside”. The cemetery frames the nearby church, the Asolani hills, the Rocca di Asolo fortress and the Dolomites that stretch across the Veneto plain.

The 52-minute film “Memoriae Causa” (2007) directed by Ricardo de Cal, which depicts the cemetery, is worth seeing. It bears the name of his monograph (1977), which was issued in an edition of 200 copies.

Scarpa studied at the Academy of Fine Arts and taught at the IUAV University of Architecture in Venice. His works include the reconstruction and garden of the Kerini Stampalia Foundation (1949-1959) in Venice, the Venezuela Pavilion (1954) and a small patio with a curved canopy and a lily pond in the corner of the central pavilion of the Venice Biennale (1949), the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona and Olivetti typewriter showroom in Piazza San Marco (1958).

Buried at the Brion cemetery, his work is a requiem for life. “I tried to bring some poetic imagination into it, not in order to create poetic architecture, but in order to make a certain type of architecture that could convey the feeling of formal poetry. […] The place for the dead is the garden. […] I wanted to express the naturalness of water and meadow, water and earth. Water is the source of life,” says Scarpa himself.