An approach for La Cornisa: A cemetery

Dutch practice XML has won the competition for Europan 10 in Tallinn and received honorable mentions for its proposals in Madrid and Munich. Europan is a biannual, pan-European competition that aims to bring to the fore Europe’s young architecture and urban design professionals by realizing the prize-winning proposals. Over the period of twenty years that the Europan competition has been held, XML is the first office to be successful in three respective Europan sites at the same time.

MADRID

In the Europan competition in Madrid, XML was awarded an honorable mention for its proposal ‘El Cementerio de la Cornisa’. The project combines a cemetery with a park, to recover one of the most emblematic sites in Madrid’s city center: the Manzanares Cornice. As an area that was peripheral to the city but also contained an influential religious center, the Cornice played a double role in Madrid’s social and cultural fabric ever since some buildings were constructed there in the 13th century.

The project seeks to maximize the true potential of a void within the city. As in most European cities, Madrid’s population is waning. Urban growth has come to a standstill, exacerbated by the current recession, and the median age of the city’s population has risen considerably. The proposal of XML is based on the precept that, for a site to be absorbed within the public space of a city, meaning is more important than program. Therefore, instead of reacting with the typical developers’ reflex bent on allocating a program to each and every available location within a city, this proposal aims to attribute meaning to the intrinsic qualities of the site’s emptiness.

Within the project, XML proposed that the Cornice’s emptiness is preserved by pursuing a program characterized by emptiness: death. The proposal transforms the site into a grid of cemeteries on various plateaus, modestly following the morphology of the landscape. Instead of solely offering programmatic filling, this proposal pushes the intrinsic quality of the Cornice site to its extreme by transforming it into a tranquil, serene park within Madrid’s highly developed urban landscape. With each burial ritual, the Madrileños incorporate part of their personal histories into the site, which becomes an invisible but indelible element of the city’s mental map over the years. The routes through the grid weave into the surrounding urban areas. In this way, the Cementerio de la Cornisa project revives the aura of the convent established here centuries ago, thus strengthening the identity of the San Francisco el Grande area within the city, allowing the site to become a unique and fundamental part of the city’s public space.

Candela´s first birthday at La Cornisa

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