Abstraction and Representation: The Memorial Complex at Kampor, on the Island of Rab (1952–3) by Edvard Ravnikar

Abstract

The Memorial Complex at Kampor on the island of Rab off the coastline of Croatia was designed by Edvard Ravnikar in 1952–3 as both a war cemetery and official state monument. It contains the graves of prisoners of war who lost their lives in an Italian Fascist concentration camp built nearby in 1942. With its rough stone walls, its sequence of horizontal platforms, its low lines of graves, sliced off columns, vertical stone slabs and ceremonial route, the Memorial Complex develops an architecture of restrained monumentality. It is both a symbolic landscape and a city of the dead. The visitor moves gradually across the site from the entrance gate by means of a descending stone path which cranks to the left towards its end, revealing a low vaulted structure in stone, a primary form with vaguely sacral associations. But throughout the scheme direct reference to the imagery of particular religions is assiduously avoided. It should not be forgotten that this is a secular war cemetery conceived in the context of the post-war Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.