Project Description
This project for a sustainable funeral home is located at the mountain area of Li Ao, Wenzhou. A traditional village was abandoned, and the local residents were relocated to a development of towers nearby. These villagers have lost their the daily gathering place — a countryside playground and ancestral hall. Meanwhile, with the enforcement of the policy Zero Burial, the villagers are loosing access to the scattered mountain tombs, another kind of public space. The project creates a new funeral building that aims to balance this conflict between the traditional culture and the consequences of modernisation; and at the same time to provide a new sheltered public space infront of the funeral building that recreates a traditional tomb impression, combining expressions of the arched structures of tombs, the silhouette of mountain ridges, mountain water, and dappled light. The sinuous roads and continuity of mountainous panorama provide a kind of imagined infinity. The abandoned bricks of the demolished village offers a material to shape a light quality, through a curtain at entrance. The project mediates between local culture, lost public space, and the need for a new sustainable form of funeral development.