Life is ordinary and beautiful. So is death. In common sense, a cemetery is often associated with fear, sorrowness, and ominousness. People fear death and evade things pertaining to it, including a cemetery. Therefore, traditional cemeteries in China usually locate in remote mountains where nobody will pay a visit to unless in Qingming Festival. In this way, both the cemetery and death are isolated from the living world. On designing this cemetery, we believe, however, that a cemetery should be a common and beautiful place in a city. We pass them and pay a visit there on a daily basis, feeling grateful upon life and death.
Nan Luo Gu Xiang is a well-known hutong in Beijing, attracting featured shops and millions of tourists worldwide. Like many other traditional neighborhoods in Beijing, a large percentage of the local residents are aged people. They are not willing to leave their neighborhoods until death, and even after death. Therefore, a cemetery along the hutong will meet the need. By locating the cemetery along a busy market hutong, we try to make death normal or usual. We believe in the future a cemetery will be anything but a sad place. Instead, it will become a common place, like libraries or shops, where everyone won’t mind paying a visit and spend time there. Memories, thus, will be preserved, treasured and carried over time.
Drawing inspirations from eastern scroll paintings, a 200-meter folded screen wall is designed along the street. The screen wall, generated from a typical motion pattern of time and space, is meant to depict the ever-changing daily lives in the urban context and generate interactions and empathy through its narration and people’s movement. As an urban project in the old town of Beijing, the cemetery provides an urban park for the local residents. The major functional spaces of the cemetery are put in the underground. The screen wall on the ground has its counterpart under the ground, which provides light and tombstones for memorial. With a changing light environment and an undulating floor referring to natural terrains under the ground, the cemetery offers a new way to view death and to cherish the lost ones.
UIA HYP-Cup 2016 Design Competition | Concept and Notation Second Prize
