Principal Use: Columbarium, Exhibition Space, Memorial Gardens, Library, Performance Halls, Offices, Cafeteria, Storage
Project Site: Ansan, South Korea
Total Floor Area: 10,000 sq m.
Design Period: 2021.03
Host: The City of Ansan

A pyramid stands with its largest face planted in the ground and dissolves to a point in the sky, suggesting a transition from earth to heaven—from the material to the spiritual world. It possesses both weighty physicality and a feeling of transcendence that the cube lacks, and for this reason it became the basic form for our proposal as we felt it to be a more suitable space for mourning.

Water is the essential symbolic element of the project, deriving from the nature of the disaster, and is used as a medium by which to commemorate the victims. It flows around the building and enters the interior as light. Light that is reflected in the water bounces upward to illuminate the expansive underside of the roof, animating the above-ground spaces with the water’s surface. Light that passes through the water enters the Enshrinement Hall, which sits below ground as stipulated in the brief. 250 watertight windows, one for each of the students who died in the accident, line the perimeter of the Enshrinement Hall giving views of the sky and a bluish, rippled light to the victims’ final resting place,