Iceland is a savagely deforested country, and it does not know what to do with its dead. Hveragerði Water Cremation Centre aims to address both of these things, micro-reforesting the local land and providing a place for the letting go and memorialisation of visitors’ loved ones.

Hveragerði is around a 40-minute drive from Reykjavik and is famed for its agricultural history. The tungsten-lit greenhouses of the area are geothermally heated and this concept of growth in such an inhospitable environment played into the development of this project.

The project has three main parts: service spaces for visitors to use and move through, processing areas for the water cremation itself, and a tree nursery and forest management spaces where the sterile effluent from the unique water cremation process can be used as fertiliser to plant a new tree for every person that is cremated at the centre. A path skirting around the landscape is taken by the visitor, insulating them from the physical cremation processes with thick gabion walls and occluding edges hiding any visual crossover that may occur.

After moving through the architecture, visitors emerge back onto the landscape where they can plant the tree memorialising their loved one.