Proposal for a cemetery across the US-Mexico border at the Tijuana-San Diego intersection: in response to Tijuana’s desperate need for free space (open landscapes); to accentuate the artificiality of the borderline between Mexico and the U.S. (that ignores geography & environment); to create a spiritual link between people on different sides of the border.
This project draws from research on cemeteries and cemetery culture in Central and Latin America, and tries to incorporate the flavor of the formal/cultural language. It is composed like a story.
(1) Aberg, Sally Jean & Becom, Jeffrey (Photo). Maya Color: the painted villages of Mesoamerica.
(2) Miller, Arthur G. The Painted Tombs of Oaxaca, Mexico: Living with the Dead.
(3) Benrimo, Dorothy. Camposantos: a photographic essay.
(4) Calvo Isaza, Oscar Iván. El Cementerio Central: Bogota, la vida urbana y la muerte.
(5) Constant, Caroline. The Woodland Cemetery: toward a spiritual landscape.
(6) Johansson, Bengt O. H. Tallum. Gunnar Asplund’s and Sigurd Lewerentz’s Woodland Cemetery.
(7) Zabalbeascoa, Anatxu. Igualada Cemetery: Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós.
(8) Buendia Julbez, Jose Maria. The life and work of Luis Barragán.
(9) Riggen Martinez, Antonio. Luis Barragán: Mexico’s modern master, 1902-1988.
The cemetery unfolds with the movements of the land.
A sequence of large burial walls (crying walls) climb the hill on the Mexican side, housing the burial chambers of transitory people, whom no one will visit or bring flowers to. As such they are painted by local artists to be seen from far away. At the top of this mount, between the busy freeway and border wall, a vertical chapel opens up to the sky (for the only peaceful views).
On the U.S. side, the cemetery opens up in great North American planning fashion: a crematorium, oriented west, coordinates with the setting sun; a series of small chapels mark the crossroad intersections.
Uniting the two sides, a large cemetery complex intended as a common “free zone” sits on the border, flat across the top of the hill, similar to the Oaxacan precinct at Monte Albán.
The central cemetery complex (the “free zone”) stretches across the border. It is a negative space surrounded by burial walls and planted with crosses, a symbolic erasure of the natural ground. The central chapel complex grows off of these burial walls and consists of two chapels: a meeting chapel and a burial chapel.
People coming from opposite sides of border first meet in a simple wood chapel which faces out through the complex wall toward the east. It sits raised on a thick concrete platform, enducing a feeling of lightness.
From there, the mourners proceed into the large burial chapel where the spatial experience is an inverse of the previous, as all attention is focused down toward the ground.
The burial chapel is heavy on top and around, with a large, “double” concrete roof and concrete walls hovering over a light wood and dirt floor. The dead body is placed symbolically on this dirt floor.
This chapel faces Mexico, South.
