Conceptual Design – Orthodox Cemetery Kallepeia
Cemetery is a highly heterotopic place (Foucault,1967). It is the place of otherness that is unlike ordinary cultural spaces we used to visit in our everyday life. In fact, in our contemporary society, a cemetery makes sense as soon as someone faces death. Thus, it is a place that no one wishes to visit.
Hence, a cemetery is a very challenging project from an architectural point of view. Architecture, usually creates spaces to celebrate life, usage and inhabitation. Therefore, the complete analogous project poses significant challenges for its design and implementation.
YEAR | 2022-2023 SIZE | —- sqm. LOCATION | Paphos, Kallepia
The conceptual design of the cemetery is based on 3 main ideas
01-
Co-presence of Compassion
To create a landscape which offers a synchronic co-presence of compassion. In particular, the cemetery is developed amphitheatrically from the entrance. Therefore, this architectural gesture allows possible interactions with people visiting their relatives in this final stage of life cycle. Therefore, it assembles a space of remembrance but also celebrates new ways and connections between life and death.
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02-
Creating Places Within the Site
Aiming at creating places within the site that can be inhabited with multiple wats (i.e sitting areas, walking areas around etc) even in a heterotopic space like this. These places aim to make the ‘other city’ or the ‘other place’ more friendly, to invert the ultimate heterotopic nature of the area – where no one wishes to visit unless they have lost someone. These spaces are carefully placed in various locations of the site in order to offer a different perspective and a different inhabitation of space. They offer more private, local spaces in the site that are differentiated from the repetition of the tombs themselves. They are in fact negotiating spaces between life and death.
Symbolic Usage
Celebrate the otherness with the usage of symbolic, cosmic, ultimate shapes of rectangle, circle and cross. These ultimate shapes occupy different corners of the site, while they leave an empty triangular-shape space in the middle that hosts the tombs. This space is characterized by repetition, totality and unity, where the amphitheatric development of it allows the synchronous visual connection of a visitor with the whole space at once.
01-
Co-presence of Compassion
To create a landscape which offers a synchronic co-presence of compassion. In particular, the cemetery is developed amphitheatrically from the entrance. Therefore, this architectural gesture allows possible interactions with people visiting their relatives in this final stage of life cycle. Therefore, it assembles a space of remembrance but also celebrates new ways and connections between life and death.
02-
Creating Places Within the Site
Aiming at creating places within the site that can be inhabited with multiple wats (i.e sitting areas, walking areas around etc) even in a heterotopic space like this. These places aim to make the ‘other city’ or the ‘other place’ more friendly, to invert the ultimate heterotopic nature of the area – where no one wishes to visit unless they have lost someone. These spaces are carefully placed in various locations of the site in order to offer a different perspective and a different inhabitation of space. They offer more private, local spaces in the site that are differentiated from the repetition of the tombs themselves. They are in fact negotiating spaces between life and death.
Symbolic Usage
Celebrate the otherness with the usage of symbolic, cosmic, ultimate shapes of rectangle, circle and cross. These ultimate shapes occupy different corners of the site, while they leave an empty triangular-shape space in the middle that hosts the tombs. This space is characterized by repetition, totality and unity, where the amphitheatric development of it allows the synchronous visual connection of a visitor with the whole space at once.
