Orange Street Studio has been entrusted to create a masterplan for this austerely beautiful, 57-acre site that includes an existing cemetery. There is no doubt that the landscape of Joshua Tree is unique, with its vast openness and expansive skies, but in order to highlight its specialness, these obvious qualities need to spatially defined and “framed” while more subtle aspects such temperature and light need to be highlighted. By digging into the ground to create canyons and ravines and mounding the excavated earth to create landforms, varied spaces will be created that highlight the unique qualities of the land as well as delineate programmatic spaces. The ravines would be retained by walls that will sometimes slice into the ground and sometimes rise from it. These sculptural walls define public and burial spaces that can be canyon-like at times or open up to clearings at key moments. The walls will also serve as burial vaults and columbariums. In offering shelter from the harsh desert weather of blistering sun and strong winds, the walls highlight these phenomena by setting up contrasts between light and shade, stillness and turbulence, intimacy and vastness, exposure and protection. They create micro-climates that not only make habitation more hospitable to people but also to new colonies of plants and wildlife that otherwise would not exist. The canyon walls take advantage of the topography to collect rainwater and channel it into pools that can host oases of plants and wildlife, or become reflecting pools for contemplation. Excavated earth will be used to create landforms that rise from the ground and fold over roofs of buildings, creating a seamless landscape that can be inhabited. These “mesas” are physical markers of the cemetery, highly visible from the road but invisible otherwise. We imagine the landscape of Joshua Tree Memorial Park to be an elemental, dynamic landscape of stillness that, paradoxically, speaks about movement, change, and life processes; where the physical and material treatment of the ground creates congruence between use and phenomena.
Location: Joshua Tree, CA