Añorbe cemetery extension

Añorbe, Spain

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Technological Center of Estella

Añorbe cemetery extension

Añorbe, Spain

Firm

MRM arquitectos

Type

Cultural › Religious
Landscape + Planning › Cemetery

YEAR

2011

EXTENSION OF THE MUNICIPAL CEMETERY OF AÑORBE

GENERAL DESCRIPTION

The isolated location of the cemetery and the municipality itself, perched on the side of St. Martin, defined architectural design criteria and scale based on relationships with the landscape and the absence of formal and functional continuity with the urban morphology of the village. The architecture of the cemetery is inserted into the territory as a new mark as a physical reference.

The formalization of the program starts enclosuring the new extension from the walls of the existing one reinterpreting its forms: shaping the landscape itself, adapting to it, to its topography, containing it, only delimiting, concave and convex, as corbuserians formal echoes, incorporating their views, the generic landscape and sky, integrating finally in it.

The new walls rearrange and rewrite, add new meanings and re-signify the whole based on the pre-existence of the old cemetery wall. The partial transparency allows mediation in relation to the landscape and avoids massive and closed perception.

Despite the inherent staticity of the program, the cemetery becomes highly dynamic as it is visited, somehow activated by the movement we discover the relationship with the environment, where every path is a sequence of changing sequences, drawing different perceptions and allowing to re-read and re-understand the same landscape.

The walls are built bare bones half buried, presence of absence that grows there, which saves time and contains all its own time represented by each piece of block placed. The Wall has not only its own time but happens every time we see it.

COMPOSITION AND LANDSCAPE. ARCHITECTURAL INTENTIONS

The project starts from the redefinition of a traditionally closed cemetery, unoccupied and underutilized for landscape, through the design of a discontinuous limit, less impermeable, improving continuity with the landscape, wind, light and nature; immutable elements of nature and time.

An architecture filled with relations. The positive-negative opposition, concave-convex, space-matter, are the starting inputs from which design the landscape.

Walls built uncovered, in pure structure, emptied of any unnecessary construction or finishes, showing the qualities and facts described above. These walls soften or eliminate corners as final organic process of adaptation to nature from the urban fabric through the old cemetery. The existing cemetery is modified at both ends to enable a new internal communication and a covered morgue.

Discontinuous wall forms, enlightened and decontextualized blocks question the classical binomial function-form /construction method, allowing to recognise a design intent that aims to be above their use, form and common construction practices.

Functional criteria and gardening (pending execution)

The new expansion adds two new spaces collected, more intimate and two more open areas, as well as modifies existing cemetery.

The open design of the walls keeps the current topography of the plot avoiding earthworks and construction of retaining walls overly aggressive with the landscape. This allows the hillside and trees descend and enter into the cemetery in a better integration into the native landscape.

The walls of the cemetery will progressively be covered with vegetation in certain places. The central and the outside will be replanted with native trees on the hillside, providing inside other ornamental trees.