Currently the Park Cemetery has approximately 14,500 locations distributed around several facilities intended for traditional burials (vault or open ground burials and common grounds) and adapted to cinerary practices (columbariums, caverns, memorial garden)
May be buried in the cemetery:
All people residing or deceased in one of the eight municipalities in the union territory
All people entitled to a family burial
Dogs, even on a leash, bicycles, scooters and jogging are prohibited in the cemetery
Cemetery open everyday
Informations available from Monday to Friday from 8.30am to 5.30pm. +33146320525
Our History
“From our standing houses to our lying houses” This sentence from the Countess of Noailles who spoke thus of the dead is the perfect illustration of the city of La Plaine and the Cimetière du Parc, designed in a reflection of global urban planning and establishing a permanent dialogue between life and death. We will find through the design of the cemetery, its symbolism and its use, this exchange made of contrast - life, death - night and light...
The origin of this cemetery
Just after the Second World War, municipal cemeteries were saturated and the general secretaries of the time launched a consultation in the south of the Seine department. Five municipalities will respond favorably to this project, Clamart, Châtillon, Vanves Malakoff and Issy les Moulineaux, then Boulogne will join the project a few years later. The cemetery project which was born from 1943 will be the origin of a tremendous acceleration in the development of this part of Clamart. The need for places for the dead also corresponds to a new demand for housing for the living. The intercommunal cemetery union of the Clamart cemetery was formed in 1946. At that time, the top of Clamart on the edge of the woods was made up of small suburban neighborhoods and fields of market gardeners (the famous peas!) In 1947, when the project was presented; the Ministry of Reconstruction and the planning committee require all of the land bordering the cemetery to be subdivided. These are therefore 80 hectares which will be expropriated (40 hectares correspond to the area of the cemetery and 40 hours to the town planning operation and the creation of housing (around 2000 housing units and 89 pavilions will then be built).
The construction of the city and the creation of the cemetery were then entrusted to a single team led by the urban architect Robert Auzelle. Robert Auzelle became passionate about funerary art until he completed his final thesis at the urban planning institute of the University of Paris. To deal with this more global urban planning project and to establish a real dialogue between the city and the cemetery, Robert Auzelle will completely rethink the initial project of the cemetery and move from a “French-style” organization with the straightness of the paths to an ordering inspired by Anglo-Saxon and Northern European cemetery models. This second proposal will thus be retained by local decision-makers. Opened in 1958, when it was created it was the first park cemetery in the Paris region and the most accomplished work of Robert Auzelle, it is operated over 30 hectares.
The Conception
For Robert Auzelle: “man is instinctively this improvised architect whose installation in the afterlife, his residence in eternity are as much a concern as his temporary habitation” The cemetery is designed as a place conducive to meditation and walking, completely open to the city, the architect created a large square, a monumental gate and a very particular facade made up of diamond points - remarkable work in concrete - the whole is enclosed by a hornbeam hedge which replaces the traditional high walls and glass gates allow the tombs to be seen in transparency. It is a place to walk for residents and families who visit their dead there. People come to stroll, walk or sit on a bench on hot summer afternoons and the little ones learn to walk. Always playing on the contrasts between dark and light, pass on the dark side the monumental portal made up of marble slabs fitted onto a metal frame, you arrive in full light on a large lawn lined with trees. The cemetery is organized around this lawn and designed like an arboretum where the foliage of deciduous or evergreen trees always creates a harmony of green and palettes of yellows to red throughout the seasons.
Here there are no monuments to the dead, just a multi-cultural funerary symbolism made of concrete, the totem is embellished with concrete plaques sculpted from wooden molds, the work of Calka which represent the signs of the zodiac in different mythologies. Next to this totem you will see two remarkable graves designed by Robert Auzelle. The tomb of the Auzelle family organized around a stone circle where Robert Auzelle was buried in 1983 and where the funerary symbols specific to each deceased member of the family populate this space and the LESAGE tomb, builder of the cemetery designed as a “very small” Egyptian tomb in the form of a vault with drawers. To be faithful to the work of Robert Auzelle and respect the site, classified since 1983 as a protected site, the esplanade was redone in 2010 strictly identically.