Funeral Parlor – TASH architects – Spain

Architects: TASH – Taller de Arquitectura Sánchez-Horneros
Location: Toledo, Spain
Project Team: Emilio Sánchez-Horneros, Antonio Sánchez-Horneros, Javier Rodríguez, Alberto di Nunzio, David Melar, Marta Zamanillo
Structural Engineering: Eusebio Sánchez de Gracia
Technical Engineering: Francisco Guadamillas
Project Year: 2008
Project Area: 1,698.65 m²
Photographs: Miguel de Guzmán

Over a raised platform, located in the entrance of Toledo cemetery, lies the New Funeral Parlor. From here you can behold the city center, the new districts and a wide sector of the Tajo riverbanks. Of course the project doesn’t waste this unique chance by turning the place and its possibilities in the main string of it. We access the building focusing in the well-known silhouette of the city center and led by a stone wall of masonry that works as a reference for the building itself. Every part of the main access is considered as a big promenade that uses the excellent views in its favor, conducting, showing, hiding, framing and qualifying the different perspectives from the inside and outside of the building. An intense relationship with the landscape and a constant in and out traffic are both considerations and goals in this project.

As a trench dug in the earth, the gallery before the barrows shows the landscape and hides from sunlight southeast-southwest arch with a powerful concrete cantilever slab that is actually an extension of the gallery ceiling itself. The gallery is slatted in its upper part for completing the solar protection. The linear space of this gallery turns and twists, looking for the best views of the cathedral and the city center, while giving place to soft lines in the edges and adding sensuality and dynamism to this space. Pathways divide and separate into two clearly different sectors visually connected through the barrows, slowly losing emotional graveness through the gallery that is configured as a “living” and linking space.