Songs of Amber

A Columbarium designed as a living place to reflect the cycles of life and death. A personal as well as collective experience of loved ones that have made their journey with the ‘other’ sun.

Concept Design: Feifei Feng, Michelle Boyde, Ye Wang

Architecture Design & Visualization: Feifei Feng

Our site is organized around a central Amber Memory Hall. The shape of the architecture is derived from a vesica piscis form, in reference to leaf structures or seed pods, fertile silhouettes that are unfurled gently by Saule, the Sun. The two cast-in-place concrete shells lean in towards one another, as though in a supportive embrace, but remain partially open to her interaction.

Visitors approach via pathways at either end and traverse the structure via sub-terrain outer pathways. Narrow streams of water follow the line of the internal structures and add to the reflectivity and peace of the internal space. Songs or epitaphs are engraved on the stones along the top curvilinear subterranean wall. A few curved benches radiating out from the hall, are integrated with the contour of the natural topography, Informal amber-stone-like seatings are also scattered around the site. At night, the stars can be seen above from inside, and visitors are encouraged to sit on the grassy banks outside to watch the amber niches light up like their own starry night.

We are taking this opportunity to rethink columbarium niches that can be particularly tied to Latvian culture and environment. Amber, “substance of the sun”, from native pine trees, and important gemstone to Latvians stood out to us as a unique material for this purpose. Instead of the conventional rigid cubic niches, we want to soften the coldness and hardness of death and devise a more natural way of preserving memories, that resonates with the place it resides.

500 amber-windowed niches, with 3 modular sizes, are spotted around the concrete shell structure, as well as the low sub-terrain concrete walls hugging the center hall. These niches resemble natural resin formations and are a gentle way to hold and caress what has been left behind. Amber as a fossilizing tree resin, is used in our design to fossilize sacred objects of the dead - a wedding ring, lock of hair or note from a loved one, can be fossilized in liquid amber or resin, before being set in place. With its semi-transparent qualities, these act as windows to the soul and pay respect to the Latvian tradition of amber pieces often buried with the dead.

As the mother sun moves throughout the day, the amber ensemble creates varying visual dappling of light and shadow on the walls. It is a visual concert of sorts, conducted by the sun. Sunlight reflecting and moving through the amber surfaces replaces the need for candle-burning - for what is more striking and transcendent than sun touching amber, with its warm golden hues and electric charge? At night the sun’s effect is replaced with LED lights built into the niches, light-sensor activated, and akin to stars.