Interior Architecture
Adaptive Reuse
RISING FROM WATER
2019
Woonsocket, RI
Eco-Crematorium
43,000 SF
Location
Building Type
Building Area
Rising From Water is an architectural meditation on climate inevitability and human ritual. Set within an aging mill complex along a flood-prone riverfront, the project reimagines an industrial relic as an eco-crematorium—part civic infrastructure, part contemplative landscape. It asks architecture to do two things at once: make rising water levels legible as a slow, cumulative force, and offer a dignified, ecologically grounded sequence for farewell.
A Living Barrier
The proposal treats flooding as a timeline rather than an isolated disaster—something that advances gradually, season by season, until it reshapes the ground itself. Instead of resisting water with a hard defensive wall, the project builds a “soft barrier” through a living cemetery: a memorial forest planted with biodegradable urns containing cremated remains, where each tree is nourished by the ritual of return. Over time, individual acts of mourning accumulate into ecological infrastructure—thickening root systems, increasing biomass, and forming a porous buffer that slows and absorbs floodwater while marking the site’s changing edge.
The old mill is not erased; it becomes the armature for this new cycle of transformation. Its industrial shell supports a procession from crematorium to chapel to open burial forest, allowing a once-depleted building to host renewed life. As the memorial forest matures, architecture and landscape function as a legible index of time: the barrier grows because people continue to come, grieve, and plant—turning climate data into an embodied civic ritual that literally strengthens the site.
↑ Water is both the method and the mandate—ritual and resilience at once.
The project adopts alkaline hydrolysis as its cremation method: a water-based process that uses water, alkali, and heat to gently reduce the body to mineral ash. That ash is then returned to the site through biodegradable urn plantings, forming a memorial forest that thickens over time into a porous, flood-buffering “soft barrier”—a cyclical system where water enables both transformation and protection.
