Green Repose

About The Entry

The Life Celebrant (TLC) is a boutique funeral company providing personalized and customized bereavement services. In conservative Singapore, death is more than often a taboo topic. TLC helmed by lady entrepreneur, Angjolie Mei, is open to innovative approaches and solutions that would enhance and improve their funeral celebrant services, while encouraging people to change their perspective about death and break the taboo. With the site being located at 10 View Road, Singapore; it was formerly a hospital before being abandoned allowing for nature to reclaim part of the complex. The site's strategic location, rectilinear layout and vast surrounding nature stands out as a spot with great potential for rejuvenation. Local funeral services are often held in makeshift environments such as apartment's common void decks or temporal tentages set up by casket companies while Columbarium are generally seen as highly religion-oriented where visitors in mourning could grief.

The design concept is to re-define Columbarium spaces into a hospitable and social setting whilst providing holistic healing experiences for its visitors. The spatial experience aspires to expand visitor’s horizon by altering pre-conceived notion of how Columbarium visits are often a solemn event but instead a remembrance for the life that was once lived by the deceased.

As part of the holistic healing journey, visitors are encouraged to challenge the traditional ways of burial by opting to upcycle deceased’s body to serve as catalyst and be re-integrated back to nature; allowing us to give back to the earth that nourishes us all our lives, all in all a 're-birth'.

Inspired by various flora and fauna that can be found within the site complex, the design strategy is to adopt a 'Biomimesis' approach to de-construct botanic elements into its basic forms before re-constructing them into massing models that sculpt unique spaces that invokes emotional responses of the space users.