The French architect Robert Auzelle (1913-1983) is well known for his works as town planner, implemented particularly in the fifties, in the district of “La Plaine” in Clamart (Hauts-de-Seine). He is also renowned as a specialist in funerary architecture thanks to his papers and to his realization of the first real French landscaped cemetery of the XXth century, begun in 1946, still in Clamart. However his other necropolises, such as the one of Valenton (Val-de-Marne) remain little known. In this city located in the southwestern suburb of Paris, Auzelle develops his ideas to reinvent French cemeteries, where he wants to create a place of reunion, a location suitable for recollection and a renovated expression of the sacred character. This "landscaped cemetery" would propose the synthesis between the American "park cemetery", the "forest one" of Germanic tradition, and the "architectural cemetery" typical of Mediterranean countries. In addition, the architect tries to develop a renewed approach to graves themselves here. The project, realized at the beginning of the seventies, conforms altogether to his drawings. The artistic interventions play an important role here, with Auzelle integrating monumental sculptures ordered to visual artists whom he chooses carefully: Pierre Székely (1923-2001) for "The Ages of Life" at the entrance of the cemetery and Pierre Sabatier (1925-2003) for the folding screens "The Tree of Life" and "The Cosmos" in the space of ceremony. However, here he largely fails in his will to renew the funeral art, not managing to multiply the wall-niche tombs and to impose - on families as well as on marble masons - his drawings for all the graves. Today the cemetery stretches out on over 32 hectares and presents: a crematorium (created in 1986 in the half-buried floor of the funeral parlor), traditional spaces of burial (among which a Jewish and a Muslim one), landscaped spaces of burial, an ossuary, a columbarium, wall-niche tombs and a funerary site (with a rocky ground for ashes scattering and ...