The 80-year-old Guápulo Cemetery is located in Quito, Ecuador, into a consolidated urban land in the heritage area, within a diverse context, thus, the proposal focuses on the integration with the environment, the potential through open and inclusive public space, generating new perspectives of occupation and use.

Second Award | RTFA 2017 Awards
Category: Public Building (Concept)

©Josselyn Moreira

The goals are: To regenerate the current space, through urban and architectural multiprogrammatic strategies. To provide a funeral space with spatial quality and universal accessibility. To promote a space of funerary cult according to the present time, solving spatial and occupational conflicts detected in this type of equipment.

The main problem is the limitation in capacity, the volume occupied in tombs is studied through the process of decomposition of corpses and the process of acceptance by relatives (reduction of visits to the cemetery), and a new typology is proposed: GUÁPULO ROTATIVE CEMETERY.

©Josselyn Moreira

The Guápulo Rotative Cemetery is an optimum and efficient system consisting of two types of burial: drawers (coffins) and commemorative well (columbarium: urns), where the time spent in the drawers is 5 years, to later exhume the remains (which occupy a smaller volume) and move them to occupy an urn in the memorial well.

©Josselyn Moreira

In this way the operating system is optimal and efficient, solving a problem of space and occupation of actual cemeteries around the world, besides being conceived with the sensitivity that a cemetery projects, by light, scale and proportion; considering the process and circulation from mourning to burial as an essential element of funeral throughout history.