The project’s purpose is twofold. First, it serves people who passed away while living in the streets, providing them with a dignified resting place. Secondly, it visualizes unhoused people and their struggles in a public space of shade and contemplation.

To achieve this, we had to go to Santiago General Cemetery (Chile’s largest) for help finding a proper site. The plots they offered us were way out of our budget, in—surprisingly, even to us—the most expensive land in Latin America.

Our first design intention was to ask if building atop an existing structure might reduce the site cost. After the Cemetery’s legal department made consultations, we discovered it was cost-free to build over another building in this Cemetery.

Besides the incredible news for our budget, it meant that we could locate our Mausoleum and Memorial in one of our favourite spots in the Cemetery: an abandoned highline structure made in the 1970s, which was in bad shape. It was also an opportunity to reclaim and revive this public space, out of the standard circuit of the funerary complex.

This way, our project rehabilitates a dilapidated elevated street, 100 meters long and 3 meters wide, looking towards the urban horizon. Additionally, two parallel and facing rows of columbariums also function as benches for the living, totalling 372 available units.

This metaphor of a harsh urban condition—where these homeless people spent their final days—contrasts with the addition of a lightweight metal roof. Street and roof.