Atlas Cappella Funeraria Colombo

Seen from outside, the chapel, abutting onto the outer wall of the cemetery, has the form of an enclosed edifice, very restrained, with a tall door leading to the interior. The concessions to decoration are extremely measured: the pale stone is scored vertically; a very thin stringcourse cornice runs around two thirds of its height; the door frame is slightly recessed with a slight overhang of the eaves; and a slender iron cross is set on the roof. The simple geometry of the iron surround of the glass door is constructed on the theme of the square and its diagonals and the name of the family is inscribed in metal rods slightly detached from the surface of the wall beside the door. Externally the architecture contrasts with the monumentality of the nearby chapels with its formal simplicity, refined detailing and the purity of the geometries rigorously interpreting a twentieth-century taste purified of decorative elements. Inside, the two leaves of the door pivot on two pins to fold back against the walls. The side and back walls form so many parallelepipeds enclosing the superimposed loculi bearing the names inscribed in relief, separated by slender horizontal metal strips. The formal and functional theme is that of the stack, a theme that would be developed in complete abstraction in the nearby Marelli Funerary Chapel two years later. There is a cavity of a few dozen centimetres between the two lateral stacks and the bottom one filled with two strips of glass that open like a flap, doubled towards the exterior by two other fixed windows. The verticality of the interior is accentuated by the space of the horizontal grooves of the metal strips at the top and by the two vertical strips of glass that lighten the impending weight of the stacks. An oval bronze chandelier hangs on a long chain from the flat ceiling. The small altar, almost a console, is made of black painted sheet metal.