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Urban Cemetery

Part 2 Project 2013
Valentina Marin
University of Chile | Chile
Urban Cemetery_ How to redefine the unwanted

Today’s cities are splashed with stains. Stains formed by certain urban spaces and facilities that are rejected by its surroundings and become detached of the city’s basic urban dynamics. The project set its sights on a specific case study: “the cemetery as an unwanted urban space and facility”. It’s taken as an opportunity to reverse the marginalizing strategy with which has been handled in the past, and enhance its meaningful, emotional and collective value, while acknowledging the typological and functional changes in today’s funerary structures.

Cemeteries, as a theme, it’s an urban planning, urban space, and design issue. It’s an opportunity to explore through architecture. The cemetery is an urban space and a public facility, a place not just for the dead but for the living as well and as such, should be explored by the architectural practice.

Knowing the utter futility of trying to keep the cemeteries outside the city’s limits (just to be later absorbed by its natural growth) it’s proposed to incorporate them to the city and its network, from the beginning.

The project is located in downtown Santiago de Chile, and recuperates an abandoned Industrial Complex. Like the cemetery that lost its original positive value, this complex too fell from grace, once a vibrant place that provided the neighborhood with jobs and identity, it’s now the face of its decay.
The project seeks to reverse both this negative conditions: the cemetery as urban space and facility, and the industrial complex as a site, integrating them into the city’s urban dynamics.

Valentina Marin

Tutor(s)

2013
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