South Haven Centre for Remembrance / Shape Architecture + Team2 Architecture Inside Style
+ 20

Text description delivered by the architects. The new South Haven Centre for Remembrance generates a new non-denominational facility for the Metropolis of Edmonton. The primary goal of the design and style was to memorialize times in time and spatially seize the high quality of the seasons through the interplay of gentle, shadow, and darkness. The structure options a symbolic 13-meter tower that emerges from the prairie landscape, creating reference to the current gravesites, monuments, columbaria, and the latent memory that they embody. Our memory of checking out a cemetery is marked by time the place of the sunshine, the good quality of light, and the weather conditions on that certain working day. For some, it might be a solitary stop by for a ceremony, for other people it may possibly be skilled by way of ritual visits which span the relaxation of their life.

The special mother nature of this setting up typology was coupled with the rare opportunity to place a building inside of a huge twenty-one-hectare website. The improvement of a partly submerged landform creating was conceived of as a wandering line in the landscape furnishing a visual link to and from the constructing. The preparing system centered on the watchful placement of the key entry and essential general public software spaces, which authorized a spatial sequence of general public spaces to unfold to tackle public arrival as very well as providing spaces and locations for silence, reflection, and pause.

The organizational system spatially distinguishes concerning the ephemeral and the lasting. The ephemeral references shorter visits and respond to the all-natural qualities of gentle, seem, and temperature which are intently related to time and the seasons. The permanent corresponds to burial and the actual physical file linked with sustaining memory and the actual physical artifacts that characterize the cemetery this is the deep basis of the developing as they support the everlasting memory of the persons that are laid to rest in the cemetery.


The colour and overall character of the building look at the partnership of modulating light-weight patterns in the building interior during the seasons as effectively as the extended crisp wintertime shadows that are forged from the making edges. The mixture of black scorching-rolled metal panels and a black charred (shou sugi-ban Accoya) pores and skin act as a counterpoint to the snowy winter season problems and the transforming romantic relationship of the developing in the landscape all over the yr. The main entrance sequence supplies a compressed instant of darkness prior to opening the oversized metal pivot doorways which expose the light-weight luminous interior house and the framed perspective of the downtown skyline seen across the winter-back garden courtyard.


The tower is characterised by a big triangular clerestory which allows diffuse north light-weight to enter the assembly rooms. The variety and progress of the tower progressed by way of numerous iterations to optimize the top quality of mild and more exclusively how mild and shadow casts inside of the tower on the summer months solstice. The word solstice derives from the Latin words sol (sun) and sistere (to stand still), and the reverence of gentle and shadow in the tower are celebrated on this yearly datum.
