PORTLAND COMMUNITY MAUSOLEUM​

The design of the Portland Community Mausoleum tackles the challenge of creating a sacred space in the middle of a vibrant urban neighborhood and adjacent to a major highway.  The process begins with a bronze-clad veil structure creating a threshold between casual street life or passing cars and the sacred site, while maintaining a soft visual connection inside and out.  Developing a pedestrian-only street calms the transition and approach, and a monolithic stone structure breaks through the veil and offers a place for visitors to process into the site.  Implementing a plinth requires visitors take three gentle steps up, giving a nod to their entrance into a new realm, and massive bronze doors highlight the entrance of the spiritual center.  As they enter, a large gathering space allows visitors to collect, and they can move up to a ritual room at the top level, beyond a private crematorium, or continue through the building to enter the memorial gardens.  In the gardens they are greeted by four more towering monoliths at the edges of the plinth, which is surrounded by calm, still water.  A smaller gathering space exists on the ground floor of the towers, with burial spaces above up to the height of the veil walls.  Each tomb contains a removable keystone, a stone-encased tablet on which families can digitally store memories of loved ones.  Visitors can bring the tablet with them and find a private space for reflection in the varied spaces on floors above the veil, where they can take in views out to great distances, or they can return to the memorial gardens.  The still pool of water surrounding the plinth reflects the veil walls and blurs the sense of beginning and end of the threshold surrounding the sacred space.  For visitors with loved ones not laid to rest at the site, a more humble central black obelisk on axis with the entrance contrasts the large, white stone towers, and provides a memorial for remembrance.  When viewed from a distance, the Mausoleum's veil structure maintains a consistent building skyline along the block, with the large stone towers extending above providing a sense of monumentality.  The site will remain as a public memorial garden in perpetuity, long after the last soul is laid to rest at the site.