- Area: 1698 m²
- Year: 2008
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Photographs:Miguel de Guzmán
Text description provided by the architects. A funeral parlor is a building that everyone of us visits sooner or later throughout our lives. Each of us are interact with the building in different ways, as a visitor, a close friend, or a family member.
Over a raised platform, located in the entrance of Toledo cemetery, lies the New Funeral Parlor. From here you can behold the city center, the new districts and a wide sector of the Tajo riverbanks. Of course the project doesn't waste this unique chance by turning the place and its possibilities in the main string of it.
We access the building focusing in the well known silhouette of the city centre and led by a stone wall of masonry that works as a reference for the building itself. Every part of the main access is considered as a big promenade that uses the excellent views in its favor, conducting, showing, hiding, framing and qualifying the different perspectives from the inside and outside of the building. An intense relationship with the landscape and a constant in and out traffic are both considerations and goals in this project.
As a trench dug in the earth, the gallery before the barrows shows the landscape and hides from sunlight southeast-southwest arch with a powerful concrete cantilever slab that is actually an extension of the gallery ceiling itself. The gallery is slatted in its upper part for completing the solar protection.
The linear space of this gallery turns and twists, looking for the best views of the cathedral and the city centre, while giving place to soft lines in the edges and adding sensuality and dynamism to this space. Pathways divide and separate into two clearly different sectors visually connected through the barrows, slowly losing emotional graveness through the gallery that is configured as a "living" and linking space.
