Montpellier Metropolitan Cemetery by Agence Traverses

Photographer: Marie-Caroline LUCAT

The particularity of our project lies in the versatility of its responses to the program and its adaptation to the site. We treated the cemetery like a public landscaped park, we have developed a symbolic work on the relationship between death and the cosmos, nature, earth, sky, and light.

Thus, the sky and the earth speak to each other through devices of paths, framings and openings materialized by a communion between the landscape and the architecture by installing the infrastructures, the places of burials, and meditation in a large park. The strong local hydraulic constraints have been treated in a gentle way, by the landscape. The declination of the hydraulic structures participates in the creation of the atmospheres and the sequences of wandering.

The cemetery is embedded in the topography of the site and organized around the natural path of the flow of water, this interlocking of the different scales makes it possible to gradually move from the scale of the large landscape to that of a tomb.

This composition makes it possible to offer a variety of paths in a new fabricated landscape and a variety of near or distant points of view, towards the already constituted landscapes. Apart from the fabricated landscape, the main material of the project is raw concrete, which expresses the relationship to the earth.

Design Team:

Lead Architects: Agence TRAVERSES
Landscape Architects And Engineering: Agence TRAVERSES

Photographer: Marie-Caroline LUCAT