YU Momoeda (YU Momoeda Architects)

This is a funeral hall planned next to Kamiainoura Station in Sasebo City, Nagasaki Prefecture, Japan. When I visited the site, the sight of people standing by the tracks, waiting for their train, overlapped in my mind with the image of mourners gathering to bid farewell to the departed. This inspired me to conceive the funeral hall as a station, aiming to provide an opportunity for people to perceive death—an inevitable part of life—as something adjacent to the everyday. The main theme of the design is to create a farewell space that evokes a connection to a “distant somewhere,” much like railway tracks stretching beyond the horizon.