Past Student Work Archive – Alastair Browning

HANEDA VIRTUAL CEMETERY, TOKYO BAY

Tokyo’s waterways were once thriving trade routes and the backdrop for rituals such as the Festival of Obon, where the rivers would be filled with thousands of floating paper lanterns known as Toro Nagashi.The connection with the waterways have, however, gradually been erased from the cities consciousness.

Haneda Virtual Cemetery is located in the industriual hinterland of Tokyo Bay, a physical ‘place’ for ‘virtual assets’, where the deceased are digitally memorialised following their cremation within the city. The building is conceived as the ceremonial end to an urban-scale funeral, with the cremation and bone-picking rites taking place elsewhere in Tokyo. The site is arrived at by boat and can be re-visited in the following years, the landscape forming a publicly accessible wetland park where flora and fauna are encouraged to grow wild.

A series of sunken memorial wells are interconnected by finger-like valleys which allow the mourners to slowly descend below the horizon-line and physically become disconnected from the city. The wells are activated by data-projections onto central pools which can be observed from surounding terraced seating areas.

The scheme occupies the inter-tidal zone; the rising and falling tide periodically floods parts of the Cemetery allowing it to slowly emerge as the floodwater recedes. As the wells illuminate, they form a collection of glowing pixels which communicate back to the city.

The project culminated in an exquisite projection model which explores themes of the immaterial, the nature of Kawai (event space) and new territories which float between digital culture and deat