1999 UK Award Part 1
A Place of Remembrance

The brief for this project dealt with the idea of archiving the intangible. An everyday object or event was to be observed and analyzed, and its intangible qualities recorded. I chose a flowering plant, the Anigozanthos. Within the context of our society, the cut flower has become a symbol, a vehicle for expression. It has become an icon, used as a metaphor for life, death, and other events. I am trying to look past the references society has placed upon this object.

I chose this particular flower because its physical appearance was strange in the sense it is not one typically picked for its beauty. It became easier to look at it objectively. What struck me at the beginning was the strong sense of order and hierarchy that existed. This flower has a very specific structure and form, and I decided to analyze the hierarchy of the makeup of the plant in terms of its growth.

From this analysis, I constructed a device, which attempted to show the order that existed in terms of the whole plant, down to the individual flowers. The device describes the order of growth through the use of water and sunlight. It is a synthetic metaphor of my observations of nature, pinpointing the minute spurts of growth that we cannot necessarily see. It has become an archive of an event.

In broader terms, the device describes the continuous cycle of growth and life. There is the idea that the flower itself is also an archive, one of the chemical processes, DNA, and time. When we buy a cut flower, we are getting it at the end of its life span. However, for us these last few days of its life presents us with a new existence, a beginning. This is the threshold between life and death. The flower starts its inevitable decay, and we are left only with its memory once it has withered completely. Since the device represents the life cycle, I strongly felt it important to speak of death as well. The brief for my scheme evolved into a place of remembrance, drawing on the themes explored in the device.

The building was the final stage of the scheme and in a sense, the culmination of the analysis of my object and the device. The cemetery in itself is a collective archive of those that have passed on. It provides a point of reference for those still alive to return to. As with the flower, the cemetery deals with the cycle of life and memories, and is a threshold space where life and death meet. I wanted to create a space where visitors could come and contemplate, be on their own if they so wished, or with others. It is a cemetery for the ashes and mementos of those that have passed on.

Santiago de Compostela in Spain is extremely important to those of the Catholic faith. Since the ninth century, pilgrims have arrived on foot, their focus being the cathedral, an archive in a way for the relics of St. James.

There is a very strong spirituality that exists in the town. Therefore, I wanted visitors to make their own pilgrimage to the cemetery, which is a secular one, allowing anyone who wishes to use the space. This enables people to come from afar with ashes or mementos, which are portable. I am in essence borrowing from what already exists in the town translating it to suit my scheme.

The site itself is a strip of land that sits right outside the town center. It creates a kind of gulf between it and the town due to its positioning and size. From it, one can look back at the town of Santiago with the cathedral in the distance. Due to the actual site, the scheme concentrated heavily on the issues of landscape. I wanted my insertion to be part of the landscape as much possible. I have tried to allow the landscape to shape my scheme and my ideas for the scheme shape the landscape. I have taken reference from what already existed on and around the site, as well as the cultural context the scheme finds itself in. For example, the Spanish have a tradition of burying their dead above ground and this influenced the way in which the urns would be stored.

I make reference to the Cathedral, that can be seen from the site, by facing the secular chapel toward it. The vernacular architecture of the monasteries that surround the site influenced the use of the slate in order to clad the concrete retaining wall that runs the length of the site. Making reference to my device is the element of water that runs through the site as well as the fact the order of the elements in the scheme relate to the order of the elements in the device, which in turn make reference back to the hierarchy of the flower.

In conclusion, there are three main elements that run throughout the project, from the flower to the device and finally the building scheme. These are the hierarchy of growth and structure, the idea of singular repeated elements that create a whole and metaphors for life and death.