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New crematorium in Valladolid
The Crematorium is located in the San José Morgue of Valladolid, reusing the site of an old pharmaceutical product factory. It is located in a polygon developed throughout a highway. The project is in a residual space, at the heart of the site.
An annex to present morgue projects, it welcomes a small building which creates a new local crematorium, extending the benefits that this facility offers to the cmmunity, making possible an alternative to the traditional interments, the cremation, more and more demanded by our new urban culture.
The concrete act of the cremation of a loved one supposes a special psychic state. It seems important that the architecture that is to accompany these situations must have the maximum of sensitivity and a certain abstract character to leave the protagonist to their feelings.
Following the models of the “Nordic masters”, the architects tried to make a building of amiable scale, as an “independent chapel” from the rest of the facilitiy's “chapel in the garden”. Although here, building and garden are the same things.
The architects surrounded the building with natural elements, in an artificial landscape that is able to abstract the urban place in which the morgue is located; vegetation, water, earth, and the air pass through where the cremation will happen. The architects have taken care that the building should project a degree of what they describe as "naturalness". That is to say, creating a warm architecturual feel in its scale; elegant, but also with a point of solemnity and importance, adapted at the moment at which it is going to give service.
The materials are limited; the reinforced concrete of the walls of rough texture, reinforced concrete with wood. Carpentry consisting of empanelled, wood ceilings of cherry tree, ground of terrazzo and the glass ice, matting mirror, that covers the chimney that its colour approximates and appearance to the smoke that will have to express the moment of the cremation. The light and the shade, the pool, the tree of love, are a delicate drawing of Gloria Pretejo.
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