Tower of Four Seasons
Architectural Design / Conceptual / Competition- 2019
“Life and death are one thread, the same line viewed from different sides.” -Lao Tzu
Tokyo shows us how the dead live so silently in a city that does not sleep. This proposal tries to exemplify this by treating a cemetery as a public space that views death as an instance of rebirth. It’s more feasible for the living and the dead to coexist in a dense area like Shinjuku than have a building purely dedicated to the dead. The tower comprises of two segments: The Core (realm of the living) and the cemetery (realm of the dead), which is placed around this core. In the cemetery the ashes of the deceased are placed within neo- markers stored within the cemetery levels and the sky crypts. The neo markers are tombstones of the 21st century where a memory drive stores and shares the digital imprint of the deceased accessible by Wi-Fi preserving the memory of the deceased along with the ashes. The rebirth of the soul is symbolized through a “Sakura” Cherry blossom bonsai that grows from within the marker. The cherry blossom blooms and transforms through the year leaving the plant dead only to bloom again. It symbolizes the cycle of life that the building tries to celebrate. The building has twelve cemetery levels with their respective sky-crypts. The volumetric difference between the cemetery levels and the commercial levels would lead to 36 commercial levels.
Cemetery levels: Contain storage walls, which are essentially a plug in points for the neo markers where the flash drive is powered and the plant is watered through drip irrigation systems.
Sky Crypts: Are located below the cemetery levels where the neo markers are placed outwardly on the periphery of the building where the plant makes a more direct relationship with the city but the memory drive is more intimately connected to the viewer.
The building tries to exemplify what Shinjuku does where the dead a re coexisting with the living and death is treated as it should be, a very natural thing. The proposed system of burial may be retrofitted in existing defunct buildings to further address this issue at a larger scale.
