You and I Will Always Collide: Architecture as a Medium for Memory and Loss

What happens when architecture stops trying to contain grief and starts trying to dissolve it? "You and I Will Always Collide" proposes a memorial space that refuses solidity, rising as a translucent, pixelated tower above the city like a half-remembered image. The project operates through three deliberate strategies: deconstruction, digitization, and dematerialization. Together, they dismantle the fixed boundaries between personal and collective mourning, replacing monumental permanence with something far more unsettling and honest: fluid, sensory environments that shift with the experience of each visitor.

Designed by Ximeng Luo, Shihui Zhu, and Yuting Hu, the project earned an Editor's Choice distinction in the Circle of Life competition. The brief asked designers to reconsider how architecture mediates the rituals surrounding death. Rather than proposing a conventional memorial or funerary building, the team responded with a spatial framework that treats memory itself as the primary material, shaped by light, temperature, texture, and sound rather than walls and floors alone.

A Pixelated Tower Hovering Above the City Grid

The project's signature image is striking in its dissonance. A translucent, pixelated tower rises above a wireframe urban model rendered at night, its mass appearing to both exist and not exist simultaneously. The building reads as a digital artifact dropped into an analog city, its fragmented geometry suggesting that the structure is perpetually assembling or dissolving. This is not accidental. The design deliberately leverages dematerialization to challenge architecture's traditional promise of permanence, proposing instead a form that mirrors the instability of memory itself.

Vaulted Chambers and Vertical Circulation

The section drawing, rendered in turquoise, reveals the building's interior logic: a series of vaulted chambers connected across multiple levels by linking passages that guide visitors through a carefully choreographed sequence of spatial experiences. The vertical organization is not simply functional; it structures a narrative of ascent and descent that parallels emotional states of grief, reflection, and release. The scale of each chamber varies, compressing and expanding the visitor's spatial awareness as they move through.

At ground level, a circular portal framed in white and lined with dark textured tiles marks the threshold between the city and the memorial interior. Three visitors are shown passing through, their scale dwarfed by the opening. The portal functions as a clear spatial signal: crossing it means entering a different mode of experience, one governed by sensory engagement rather than conventional circulation.

Tactile Interiors That Resist the Monumental

Two interior conditions reveal how the design uses material and form to create emotionally charged environments. One space features grey inflatable domes and quilted surfaces forming a play landscape where children climb, suggesting that the building does not treat death as an experience reserved for adults or a single emotional register. Grief, the design argues, coexists with play, curiosity, and physical engagement. The softness of the materials invites touch rather than distance.

A second interior shows visitors gathered in shadow along a curved wall surface composed of horizontal brick patterns and pyramidal textured panels. The tactile density of this space contrasts sharply with the inflatable room, establishing a spectrum of sensory conditions within a single building. Temperature, shadow, and surface roughness become architectural tools as deliberate as any structural element.

Light Columns and Mirrored Dissolution

Perhaps the most evocative space in the project is a mirrored gallery where glowing vertical light columns rise from floor to ceiling while projections play across overhead surfaces. Silhouetted figures move through the room like ghosts of themselves, their reflections multiplied and fragmented. The space collapses the distinction between visitor and architecture, between presence and absence. Light here is not illumination; it is the primary spatial material, defining boundaries that shift with every step.

Tracing Ritual from Ancient Egypt to the Present

The designers ground their speculative proposal in research. An infographic timeline traces the evolution of funeral ceremony rituals from ancient Egypt through to contemporary practices, establishing a historical arc that contextualizes the project's ambitions. This is not design for design's sake; the team positions their work as a response to centuries of shifting attitudes toward death, memory, and communal ritual. The accompanying axonometric diagram distributes yellow human figures across a starfield, mapping spatial relationships between occupants in a way that reads as both analytical and poetic.

Why This Project Matters

Memorial architecture often defaults to weight: stone, permanence, gravity. "You and I Will Always Collide" inverts that instinct, proposing that the most honest response to loss might be lightness, dissolution, and sensory immersion. By treating memory as unstable and deeply personal, the design avoids the trap of prescribing a single emotional experience. Instead, it offers a range of spatial conditions, from inflatable play landscapes to mirrored light galleries, that allow visitors to construct their own encounters with absence.

What makes this entry compelling within the Circle of Life competition is its refusal to be literal. The building does not look like a memorial. It looks like something still forming, still resolving, caught between digital and physical states. That ambiguity is its greatest strength. Luo, Zhu, and Hu have produced a project that treats architecture not as a container for ritual but as a medium through which grief, memory, and presence can collide and reconstitute in unpredictable ways.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designers: Ximeng Luo, Shihui Zhu, Yuting Hu

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Project credits: YOU AND I WILL ALWAYS COLLIDE by Ximeng Luo, Shihui Zhu, Yuting Hu Circle of Life (uni.xyz).