“The San Francisco Columbarium” is a project set in the city of San Francisco. It posits a compromise between the preservation of heritage alongside the inevitable growth and expansion of the future in the city itself.
© Douglas Miller.
Jury
Kent Jackson
Mariana Pestana
Andrew Philips
John-Paul Nunes
Rik Nys
Alamo Square Park, on the edge of the city’s proposed future wave of expansion, is recommissioned as a columbarium of restoration. Parkland above is preserved as restored grasslands, while subterranean museum halls undergo a slow and unobtrusive construction process as houses proposed for demolition are saved from the growing city’s fringes.
Sites of the houses plucked from this growing ecumenopolis form low-rise community squares in their absence. As a result, small green space spreads into what will soon become a vast metropolis.
In the future, families whose ancestors’ homes were lost to the city visit the columbarium to experience the Victorian architecture in a landscape of the lost houses in the new Alamo Square.
As the Californian sun streams into the building through the windows in the parkland above, and, as visitors make their way around the Painted Ladies back to the streets outside, the dream-like neighborhood of the lost San Francisco remains preserved and an active partner in creation of the new city.
© Douglas Miller.
© Douglas Miller.
© Douglas Miller.
© Douglas Miller.
Douglas Miller
University College London
Bartlett School of Architecture
is an illustrator and concept artist currently working in London. His drawings explore stories and experiment with colorful and highly detailed compositions of surreal and fantastical architecture. Miller is also a teaching fellow at the University College of London's Bartlett School of Architecture, teaching BSc Design Unit 9 and Masters Landscape Architecture Studio 4. His clients include The Atlantic, Empire, Its Nice That, Netflix, New Scientist, The New York Times, Politico, Pilot TV, Pitchfork, The Robb Report, and WIRED.
