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Terrassa Municipal funeral home

The piece is conceived as an elemental white prism, which is gently put on the site, getting away from the traditional opaque image of that kind of buildings, and opening to the exterior through a porch in an “open arms” attitude.
The site is slightly sloped and as the building keeps completely horizontal it doesn’t rest on the ground, as if in a symbolic reference, the dead where floating half the way between earth and heaven, ready to start the trip.
That fact allows allocating the entire administrative program below the main floor separated from the rest of the program and opened to a private patio with direct access from the exterior through an exterior stair.
The program is articulated through a water patio which separates and organizes the three main parts: the waiting room, the chapel and the coffee –bar. In such a way, the way from one piece to the other is always done through that intermediate space that works as a decompression chamber.
All the waiting rooms are grouped together, close to a longitudinal hall, which opens to the porch and illuminated through patios.
The chapel, a place to pray, is higher than the rest of the building. It shows a white and pure image, in contrast to the usual baroque darkness that is typically found in those kinds of spaces, and taking as inspiration the burned images that represent heaven and are shown in some American classical movies. To reach the chapel a wooden bridge above the water has to be crossed. Inside the only possible view is the sky(heaven).Lines of low voltage lamps works as if they where churches candles.
“We have rejected the idea that our cemeteries are done as the residence of the dead or the cities where they rest which is contradicting the cultural idea, religious, of the dead as a trip, as a start to what it is beyond our world. The idea “they rest” should be replaced by “they started from here”. We change the cemetery as a completely packed space with a empty and sacred space that is the departures exit of an empty railway station or airport”.
Oteiza. Memory of the Cementerio Mitico Vasco 1986.
 
The idea “they rest” should be replaced by “they started from here”

Points of interest

Jordi Badia