Anfeh is a historic town in northern Lebanon, and with the recent tourism boom, the town’s rapid population growth has also created a demand for new cemeteries. Anfeh has a richly layered history of Phoenician, Mediterranean cultural circles, Roman imperial influences, Orthodox Christianity, and the salt industry, which together make up this rich and unique seaside town. The new cemetery concept is based on the rich cultural layers of the area, formed by the superimposition of the old Mediterranean city texture and the coastal salt field texture, the graves are weakened with artificial traces in the form of landscapes, using the rustic and coarse stone common to the Mediterranean cultural circle, and the functional architecture is interspersed with some Phoenician characteristic boat-shaped elements, naturally forming an extension of the town.
For a city like Anfeh, history is better reviewed not as a continuous linear structure, but an overlapping stack of many layers. A city of Phoenician origin, a city under the rule of Roman Empire, a city greatly dependent on salt production industry. All these layers together embodies her, shapes her into a rich and unique entity.
The texture of the cemetery should not be taken lightly. Cemetery is a part of the living city, and also a city of death by itself. Thus we overlapped two texture over our site: a map of a typical old mediterranean city and a map of the adjacent salt field. By blending these two, we get a large field well structured, a natural extension of the city.
We also want the structure of the chapel and condolence hall to derive from the same logic. Anfeh is a city of Phoenicia, a culture taking boat as a significant symbol. Orthodox churches also have their structural uniqueness. We overlap the wood framework of a boat and the arched interior of the orthodox chapel and created something new for these two small but delicate buildings.
The overlapping of structures and symbols gives the design more depth and meanwhile makes it easier to understand. Such is the power of unfamiliarity and historical nostalgia.
