Project Description
The circle; a curve without direction and with no end. This project for a new sustainable funeral facility, located in Wangzhai Village, Ouhai District, Wenzhou City, employs the circle as a continuous sheltered path, enclosing and forming a serene water courtyard; conceived as a cyclical eternal journey linking an organic series of periphery spaces of resomation, ceremony, and socialising. The large circular path is inserted into the land itself, forming a depression and revealing its substrate material. The surrounding still beauty of an abandoned village, agricultural fields, and a mountain range, is reframed by a new ever changing perspective, as the path descends from the village into the fields, and then continues through the mountains; a lived experience of burial itself. Responding to ideas of ecology and emotion, the project is a celebration of life with its spaces each touching the central circular garden of reflectance and remembrance where the deceased can be granted a final rest, and where mourners can say farewell from an endless journey of the circle of life.