Emotional Journey

As interpreted through the lens of Richard Hill’s “Purpose Function, Use”

Factory Staff Funeral Staff Staff

Mourners Visitors Users

Local Community Transients Travellers Repetition A Fan or Visiting Spectator

“There is a stream of consciousness in which the building varies in significance moment by moment, rising to conscious attention and then falling away...the office worker does this every day so that an essential aspect of the aesthetics of use is its sheer repetition”.

Divided Attention

“The user of building has a different range of kinds of experience, a different collection of types of attention, from the visiting spectator”.

Tesseract

Attributing the various stages of grief to the architecture in question can result in a holistically informed design which provides a resolve to more than just lack of green space, it can provide emotional resolve to mourners.

Denial and Anger

Stages of Grief

Auditorium

Depression

The auditorium is expected to host funerals, therefore a sombre atmosphere will be needed to

match the energy of the room.

As observed by Hill, staff confined to a space perceive the architecture differently to a spectator or user. Architecturally speaking, this means the staff spaces, such as the factory or crematorium, can be designed for function rather than form.

The staff journey is linear and devoid of holistic experience and emotion.

The user is unique in their experience as they will be dealing with physical and emotional loss. This scheme serves to help through facilitating architectural moments where the user can have a personal interaction with the deceased. These moments are spread across the site and each one can help the user to progress through the stages of grief, ultimately concluding with a celebration of life, through acceptance.

Reconstruction and Working Through

Crematorium “Purpose denotes a human intention in relation to an object, and function denotes the object’s execution of that purpose”.

“An aesthetic experience of the building could only truly be had by a person working there. The tourist or the architecture fan visiting the building could aim to imagine what it would be like to work there, and might thereby get some access to the aesthetic experience of architecture. But it would always be limited by the distance between experience and imagined experience”. “For the spectator their significance lies not in their physicality but in the fact that they represent forms which are of aesthetic interest”.

This scheme serves to help through facilitating architectural moments where the user can have a personal interaction with the deceased. These moments are spread across the site

a celebration of life, through acceptance.

Separating purpose and function has resulted in a dissection of events and an in-depth analysis of spatial coordination on site. This has resulted in the understanding that the user has the most emotional journey through the site, and the architecture should acknowledge this. The emotional journey of the user and traveller will now be considered in the upcoming design development.

Columbarium

The columbarium and gardens mark the final stages of the users’ journey through the site. Here, the design intention is to embrace death and celebrate the life through an immortalisation through urns and trees. These spaces will have the largest exposure to natural light, as a metaphor for the beginning of a new chapter, a sensory reset.

Acceptance

Gardens