Iconic Award 2014 — Architect Andrea Dragoni is the overall winner of the best of the best in the category of public buildings with Gubbio Cemetery expansion in Italy.

The architectural design of Andrea Dragoni defines the space for silence and meditation. The expansion investigates a new model of civil buildings and triggers a reasoning in physical continuity with the historic city and deeply tied to the mountainous landscape that represents the natural scenery of the city.

The plant is an urban structure within, which a series of stereometric volumes, arranged transversely to the system of the mountains, allows us to take a look through the space for dialogue with the verticality of the mountain to the north, and with the horizontality of the plain to the south. This architecture is emphasized by the intrusion of large squares to imagine how the squares that measure the rhythmic structure of the system.

Squares of silence in the form of a cube broken through the ceiling, evokes an open window at the top with the profile of a framed sky, allowing the look and the thought of abandoning the severity of mother earth.