Project Description
The city can be considered a memorial to our collective existence. In China in 2080, after a rampant period of continued unsustainable development, the city finds itself an endless heterotopia, a series of placeless places, of worlds within worlds. Mega-density towers fill every inch, darkness and chaos abound, flying machines reinvent the entrance to buildings and methods of construction and transportation. With land, a precious resource, and a polluted environment choking the downtown air, those in the city have changed their ways of life and work. Office space is no longer needed with a shift to home-working, and families move out of the city in search of peace and nature, leaving office towers as abandoned and derelict urban monoliths. At the same time, funeral architecture a building type traditionally found at the edge of the city occupying valuable land is of urban necessity. This project reinvents the typology of funeral architecture, as a system of rapid-construction components and elements that can be used to adapt and reuse abandoned office towers for urban funerals and continuing a peripheral tradition of public space as a memorial. The project utilizes parasitic additions and interventionist adaptation to form connected funeral and memorial inhabitations and as a typological system a system that could be adapted for further sites and at scale. An architectural language is developed referencing traditional forms and symbolism, conducting multi-layered narrative and sequences, and utilizing forward-thinking methods of air-borne construction and reassembly. The transformation is immersive, elemental, and staged. Set in Wenzhou downtown, the project is for a funeral system of 2080.