Forest Fireflies

Architectural idea competitions

“Death is a mystery and burial is a secret.” Stephen King.

Client: Riga Forest Cemetery
Surface area: 4500 m2
Status: Participation
Timeline: 2022
Location: Riga, Latvia
Type of work: Ideas competition

The body belongs to nature, nature is embedded in architecture, architecture belongs to our bodies. In line with these statements is our proposal for the Columbarium at the Riga Forest Cemetery. It is proposed as an open-air room in continuity with the forest formed by elements developed in its verticality. The tree trunks are transformed into poles that hold and lift the souls towards the sky, playing between the heavy and the light. These vertical elements are structured in a modular pattern, so they grow like trees in the forest and are constantly changing, with different rhythms and solutions. The result is a dynamic open-air room following the steps of life, death, nature and, above all, the idea of time.

The project was born from a total emptiness, a clearing in the forest, looking for the awareness of a different space within the forest cemetery. From the emptiness, the space is ordered with a regular mesh, an attempt to organize our emptiness in the forest. The memory of the place, reflected in the paths traced in the forest by the footprints of people over time, we recovered them to break the mesh and generate the accessibility of the project. Ultimately, this recovery of the memory of the environment is completed with the degradation of the mesh in favor of the creation of interior spaces destined to places of contemplation.

The concept of death is opposed to the concept of life. As a result of the rationally organized grid, there is a dissolution of it that breaks its orthogonality, generating voids in our architectural forest. These interior spaces become the paths of the project and the spaces of respect and contemplation of the urns. Along with the antagonism of life and death, other themes emerge, such as the concept of memory, the memory of our loved ones, of time, of place.

The project comes to life after sunset, where the urns containing death are the light that guides those who are still alive. The system provides a visual connection through an artificial light installed on the back of the urn, behind a translucent marble that somehow generates a link between the viewer and the loved one. A thrilling connection between life and death that creates a cloud of fireflies in the darkness of the forest.

The basic module of the columbarium is composed of a marble slab lining, an internal metal structure and an urn coupling system that allows for different conformations.

When we mention death, we cannot ignore the phenomenon of time, the CHRONOS. This system provides continuity and possible adaptability to space, TOPOS, and time. The trunk remains static, while the cube, through a variety of hooks, can take on different compositions following the natural rhythm of time and accepting death as a natural consequence.