Set within Nunhead Cemetery, this project begins with a simple proposition: everything that lives must die, but nothing that lives is ever truly gone. Bodies return to soil, memories become stories, and matter moves between states. Architecture, too, is understood not as a fixed object, but as something that grows, weathers, fragments, and transforms through time.

The proposal unfolds as a constellation of interventions across the cemetery. The Caretaker’s Hut, Chapel, Mason’s Yard, and Archive form a network through which materials, rituals, and memories circulate. Lantern-lit processions, water routes, burial grounds, and pathways of care weave together the living and the remembered.

Throughout the project, acts of decay become acts of renewal. Diseased ash trees become timber structures, abandoned gravestones become foundations and façades, and salvaged iron railings are reborn as clamps that hold architecture in a continual state of becoming.

Rather than resisting time, the project embraces it. Through stewardship, reuse, and curated decay, architecture becomes an ecology of memory, where making and unmaking exist as one continuous act.