Like Lichen: A Memorial That Breathes Through a Moss Skin and Traditional Passive Cooling

Lichen survives where almost nothing else can, clinging to rock and bark and recording decades of weather on its surface without ever announcing itself. Like Lichen takes that organism as a brief for architecture: a memorial that does not loom over its context but settles into it, absorbing light, air and movement until the building itself becomes a slow record of time. The ambition is modest in scale and serious in intent, and that restraint is the project's strongest argument.

Designed by Kah-Lin Lee, the project was a shortlisted entry in the Hourglass competition, which asked participants to consider how architecture can hold moments of the past. Lee answers with a memorial conceived as a living system rather than a fixed object. A carbon-absorbing moss-lichen facade sits alongside techniques drawn from older climate-adapted building cultures: mashrabiya screens, malqaf wind catchers and the salsabil water feature. Remembrance here becomes something visitors feel on their skin as much as something they read.

A Lavender Walkway Under an Open Oval Sky

The second floor perspective sets the emotional register of the whole scheme. A pale lavender walkway curves beneath an oval opening in the roof, and arched bays line the route, so the path never quite reveals its end. Light falls straight down through the void, which means the experience of walking this level changes with the hour and the season. This is the project's idea of memory made spatial: not a plaque or a statue, but a sequence of conditions that shifts as the visitor moves through it.

The curve matters. Lee describes the programme as deliberately fluid, with loosely partitioned spaces that encourage exploration over prescribed routes, and the walkway's gentle arc puts that into practice. A straight corridor would read as circulation; this one reads as a promenade, slowing people down enough to register the air and light the building is engineered to modulate.

A Perforated Ring That Filters Sun, Wind and Noise

The axonometric reveals the organising move: a triangular, green-roofed volume wrapped by a perforated, patterned wall, with pink stepped seating and scattered trees in the space between. That outer ring is the moss-lichen facade, and its geometry is not decorative. Lee calibrates it against sunlight exposure, prevailing winds, noise pollution and privacy, and positions openings to draw in ventilation and daylight while limiting heat gain. The triangular patterning borrows from the logic of the mashrabiya, producing passive shade and a shifting play of shadow across the interior.

The plaza rendering grounds that system at human scale. A woman reads a newspaper on the pink terraces in front of the olive, triangle-patterned wall, an ordinary act that tells us the memorial is meant to be inhabited, not only visited. Unlike a conventional green wall, the facade is intended to absorb carbon dioxide and mitigate air pollution, so the surface that frames this quiet moment is also doing environmental work. Memorial and public room overlap, which is precisely the point: the design treats visitors as participants in the space rather than spectators.

Arcades, Water and Air That Do the Cooling

The arcade rendering brings the environmental strategy together in a single frame. Lavender arches are infilled with triangle patterns and held up by thin white columns, a pool edge runs alongside, and visitors gather by a staircase. The pool links to the salsabil, the traditional feature in which water flows across surfaces to cool the air through evaporation. Paired with malqaf wind catchers that channel cooler air into the building and drive convection-based ventilation, the arrangement aims to reduce reliance on mechanical systems considerably.

What makes the sequence persuasive is that each technique carries a spatial consequence. Shaded courtyards, aeroponic gardens and water features produce microclimates that people can sense, so comfort becomes part of the memorial's narrative rather than something hidden in a plant room. The thin columns keep the arcade porous, letting the boundary between inside and outside blur as Lee intends.

Why This Project Matters

Memorials usually reach for permanence through mass: stone, scale, symbolism fixed in place. Like Lichen proposes another kind of endurance, one modelled on an organism that lasts by adapting. By making the facade, the airflow and the water part of the commemorative experience, Lee recasts sustainability as a cultural language rather than a technical add-on. The building remembers by responding.

The project also shows a useful humility toward precedent. Mashrabiya, malqaf and salsabil are centuries-old answers to heat and glare, and Lee places them beside a contemporary moss-lichen skin without letting either dominate. For an Hourglass entry concerned with time, that synthesis is fitting: the past supplies the climate intelligence, and the living facade carries it forward. It is a quiet proposal, and it is stronger for not trying to be loud.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Kah-Lin Lee

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Project credits: Like Lichen by Kah-Lin Lee Hourglass (uni.xyz).