SOM Foundation UK Award High Commendation
‘The San Francisco Columbarium’ is a project set in the city of San Francisco. It posits a compromise between the preservation of heritage alongside the inevitable growth and expansion of the future in the city itself.
Alamo Square Park, on the edge of the cities proposed future wave of expansion, is recommissioned as a columbarium of restoration. Parkland above is preserved as restored grasslands whilst subterranean museum halls undergo a slow and unobtrusive construction process as houses proposed for demolition are saved from the growing city’s fringes.
Sites of the houses plucked from this growing ecumenopolis form low-rise community squares in their absence. As a result small green space spreads into what will soon become a vast metropolis.
In the future families whose ancestors homes where lost to the city visit to experience the Victorian architecture in landscape of the lost houses in the new Alamo Square.
As the Californian sun streams into the building through the windows in the parkland above, and, as visitors make their way around the Painted Ladies back to the streets outside, the dream like neighbourhood of the lost San Francisco remains preserved and an active partner in creation of the new city.
Douglas Miller
Tutor(s)