Integral Center of Funeral Services in Finisterre
Author
Type of work
Ylenia Alonso
TFG / Trabajo de fin de Grado
Project
Nothing is more inescapable than death. We start from the premise that, since its origins, architecture has been part of the existence of human beings, responding to the needs derived not only from life but also from death. However, today’s society, materialistic and desacralized, has lost the close relationship that architecture has maintained over time with death, as a result of which it has become the new social taboo, which translates into a lack of interest and a certain contempt for funerary spaces in contrast to other buildings.
Therefore, it should be considered that the perception of architecture varies directly depending on the predisposition of the individual. Mortuaries and cemeteries are considered cold, gloomy and sad places because the user enters them in the same way.
Nobody likes to be dead, nobody likes to be in a mortuary.
We must offer quality architecture to these spaces with such important emotional connotations, in order to facilitate the individual’s passage through certain circumstances.
The concept that offers an argumentative thread for the design of the project is the construction of emptiness.
To configure the void is actually to conceive the space between volumes built with a strong will of appropriation of the ground-ground, as a determined and firm landscaping will appropriate to the activity that will be carried out in them.
In this way the sensation of emptiness after death is interpreted and transferred not as nothingness, but as a whole full of complexities where the vital takes on strong relevance.
These voids that are the protagonists of the project are not mere remaining spaces. It is not what remains unfilled (unbuilt). It is what is built with the purest materials; heaven and earth.