Another Way to Accompany: A Yarn Canopy That Weaves Memory into Urban Life

What if a cemetery didn't feel like an ending? "Another Way to Accompany" proposes a radical shift: a landscape where the dead become the air you breathe, the shade that cools you in summer, the fragrance drifting through a grove of trees. At its core is a yarn-like mesh canopy that drapes across an urban site, its undulating geometry symbolizing the interwoven connections between life and memory. The structure does not wall off grief; it folds it into the city, creating a space that belongs as much to the living as to those being remembered.

Designed by Windy AO, 赵兮, Yang Xinyu, and 雪李, the project earned runner-up honors in the Circle of Life competition. The brief called for rethinking how death is spatialized, and this team responded with a biophilic architecture that integrates nature with the built environment, transforming the cemetery from a place of separation into a sustainable, inclusive piece of urban infrastructure.

A Canopy That Rises Like Terrain

The defining gesture is the mesh canopy itself, a flowing surface that lifts and dips across a grass field like a second ground plane. Visitors walk beneath it in a misty atmosphere where the boundary between built structure and natural landscape dissolves. The yarn-like material filters light without blocking it, producing soft, dappled conditions underneath. It is not monumental in the way cemeteries traditionally are; instead, it is atmospheric, inviting slow movement and quiet contemplation.

Inside, the draped roof creates a cathedral-like interior without walls. A reflecting pool sits below, doubling the canopy overhead and extending the sense of enclosure downward into the ground. Water, light, and mesh work together to produce a space that feels both sheltered and open. The effect is less about architectural spectacle and more about emotional calibration: a place tuned to the specific register of remembrance.

Layered Sections: Planted Roofs Above, Infrastructure Below

The section drawing reveals the project's ambition beyond its visible surface. The roof is not a single membrane but a layered system with planted surfaces that support vegetation, linking the canopy to the ecological cycles of the site. Below grade, the design accommodates underground parking, acknowledging the urban realities of access and logistics without allowing them to dominate the experience at ground level. This vertical stacking of program, from memorial landscape to functional infrastructure, is what makes the project genuinely urban rather than pastoral fantasy.

Folding Logic: From Flat Sheet to Spatial Landscape

A diagrammatic sequence illustrates how the roof form is generated through a folding operation, transforming a flat plane into the undulating canopy that defines the project. The folds are not arbitrary; they create valleys that collect rainwater and peaks that allow trees to push through the structure, blurring the line between architecture and horticulture. The diagram, set above a view of the site with existing trees, makes it clear that the design responds to what is already there rather than imposing a form from outside.

Sheltering Trees and Water: Close-Range Biophilia

At close range, the layered mesh canopy becomes something almost textile: a woven screen that shelters mature trees and a water feature below. The relationship between the structural mesh and the organic forms of tree canopies is deliberately ambiguous. Which is the architecture, and which is the landscape? The project refuses to answer cleanly, and that refusal is its strongest move. Nature is not decorating the building; it is co-producing the space. The fragrance of the trees, the sound of water, the filtered light through mesh and leaf together compose the memorial experience.

Why This Project Matters

Cemeteries occupy an uncomfortable position in contemporary urbanism. They consume land, resist densification, and enforce a separation between the living and the dead that many cultures are beginning to question. "Another Way to Accompany" challenges all three of these norms by proposing a cemetery that is also a park, an ecological system, and a piece of urban infrastructure. Its biophilic approach is not decorative greenwashing; it is structural, embedding nature into the spatial logic of remembrance so that the dead literally continue as the environment the living inhabit.

The team's conceptual clarity is what sets this entry apart. The yarn metaphor could easily have remained surface-level symbolism, but here it drives material choices, structural logic, and the experiential quality of the space. Memory, the project argues, is not a thing stored in a marble slab. It is a condition that surrounds you: woven overhead, reflected underfoot, breathed in with every visit. That is a powerful proposition, and it earned its place as a runner-up in a competition asking how architecture might rethink the circle of life.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Windy AO, 赵兮, Yang Xinyu, 雪李

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Project credits: Another Way to Accompany by Windy AO, 赵兮, Yang Xinyu, 雪李 Circle of Life (uni.xyz).