Montpellier Metropolitan Cemetery
The project consists of the extension of the municipal cemetery of Montpellier in order to make it a metropolitan cemetery (multi-confessional) for 31 municipalities.
The program, drawn up jointly with the client, provides for the construction of the following places: multi-faith burial sites, reception building, place of meditation, ossuary, remembrance gardens, columbarium, amphitheater for celebration of events.
The specificity of the project lies in its polyvalent solutions to program requirements and integration with its site.
The cemetery was conceived as a public park, its natural and tectonic landscape a symbolic expression of our relationship with nature and the cosmos, the sky and the earth, the living and the dead.
Landscape and architecture merge harmoniously to frame and reveal this dialogue through pathways, infrastructures, tombs, and meditative spaces.
The cemetery doubles as a water retention infrastructure for the surrounding area and the natural topography of the land was instrumental in integrating the local hydraulic constraints.
From this multi-scalar infrastructure emerges a diversity of ambiances and spatial sequences which forms the compositional framework for the entire project.
Thus, the flow of water shapes the cemetery, generating a deep interlock of embedded spaces, as one transits from the scale of the greater landscape to that of the tomb.
This results in multiple trajectories through this new terrain that offer the visitor multiple vistas, both near and far, towards recognizable features of the local territory.
In concordance with the landscape, the principal material of the project is béton brut, its color and texture blends with the earth from which it springs.
