THE HILLS OF SHANGHAI
The project deals with the challenge of developing a sensitive and strategical approach to designing an inclusive resting place, in the urban context of Shanghai, knowing that land is increasingly becoming a limited resource. The design ideology is rooted in the concept of returning to nature and giving it control to take over. The proposal centers around the deceased being the builders of nature, with their bodies placed within gabion cages and placed along a radially and vertically growing pattern which allows for soil and vegetation to take over the next steps of the cemetery’s development. A major aspect of this design is temporality and transformation, as it is designed to go from an attractive green space at a garden scale to become an urban forest. Our aim for this design is to be able to cater to a considerable and growing amount of burials, and for it to transform itself over time as nature takes over. This cyclical philosophy allows for the site to not have a set lifespan where it stops functioning or is made redundant, it is a continuous living cycle that works in harmony with nature and relies on decomposition for availability of new and available burial land. This design’s purpose goes beyond being site-specific, it aims at being a prototype for a design philosophy, one that becomes part of a system of different burial sites, catering for any scale of land.
