Pedro Dias Family Tomb

This is the second in our look at how designers are re-thinking the funeral home.

Pedro Dias’ Family Tomb

This astonishing tomb sits oddly yet comfortably between the two more traditional structures at its sides. Architect Pedro Dias designed this family tomb, located in the Portuguese Acor Mountains, with a focus to openness, both physically and spiritually. The design is reduced and rational, in stark contrast to the adjacent tombs, which are created in the heavy cathedral-like traditional design. Though the tomb is designed to house eight coffins, its most prominent feature is, in fact, the void at its center. This empty space invites visitors to experience the space, and the design frames the mountain landscape that surrounds the tombs. This allows visitors to engage with “both an inner contemplation and an outer one.”

“It’s a pleasing irony that the spatial void at the tomb’s heart should speak at once so clearly of absence and loss, and of the possibility of it being filled with the living.”

The tomb is constructed of a prefabricated metal structure that was transported to the site and positioned with a crane onto a concrete slab, and finished with poured-concrete walls and a final stone cladding.

Says Simon Cowell, “It’s a pleasing irony that the spatial void at the tomb’s heart should speak at once so clearly of absence and loss, and of the possibility of it being filled with the living.”