House of souls. Extension of Toledo’s Municipal Cemetery.

Contemporary urban cemeteries on the Iberian Peninsula have generally evolved into sterile infrastructures of concrete sidewalks and asphalted streets—over-urbanized open spaces that resemble suburban road-based urbanism more than places suited for farewells and the reencounter with our memories and emotions, which they ought to be.
The municipal cemetery of Toledo is currently experiencing a lack of space for new burials and a decline in its landscape qualities. Its location within the territory is privileged: it sits on a hill that separates the two riverbanks of the Tagus River and looks out toward the historic city. Its expansion presents an opportunity to reverse the environmental degradation it has suffered through successive extensions. Students, as explorers, are tasked with expanding this site with a hybrid facility operating on two scales, grafted into the territory and stitched together by the urban landscape. This includes rainwater collection, greenhouses for flower cultivation, burial spaces, and a chapel.
The arrival experience, the paths, topography, landscape, history, soil structure, water, construction systems, major and minor infrastructures, the material and the immaterial—these are the essence of a project developed over a semester. The selected projects are those that best represent the diversity of work developed in the studio and stand out for their stronger integration into the existing landscape, their sensitivity, and their plausibility in contributing to the construction of a better city.