The design of a Memorial Park and a Promatorium complex in Humewood Extention, Port Elizabeth

This treatise is the result of an initial interest in the concept of ‘terrain vague’, the phenomenon of disconnected spaces that are internal to the city yet exist outside the effective and functioning networks of the urban system (Sola-Morales 1995, 120). The notion of terrain vague informs the theoretical preoccupation of this study and sets the basis on which the contextual and programmatic concerns are considered and explored. The harbour precinct of Port Elizabeth was selected as the focus area for the study, in which the characteristics of the terrain vague were uncovered through a series of maps, diagrams and photographs. The role of the cemetery as a type of terrain vague in the urban fabric is simultanelously investigated. The study refers to Richard Weller’s interpretation of the nature of the contemporary city and principles of landscape urbanism as a basis for developing ways of approaching the city and it’s spaces of terrain vague.Through this, the study is situated predominantly in the ecological discourse. The use of precedant studies as a means of exploring the application of the theoretical principles discussed in this study is key to providing the reader with a contextual understanding and clarity. The architectural intervention proposes a memorial park in the harbour precinct. This aims to generate a spatial awakening of the terrian vague. By reclaiming the denatured landscape (oil tank farm) and re-scripting it as a culturally significant area that is re-integrated into the public realm, the opportunity to rehabilitate the ecological flows of the city is realised. The design of a promatorium complex within the proposed memorial Park aims to re-introduce the funerary landscape into the city and in doing so challenges the threat of cemetries remaining as spaces of terrain vague. The promatorium complex is seen as a facility that supports the functions of the memorial park as a commemorative landscape in the 21st century. In all this intervention aims to transform a disregarded wasteland into an operational landscape. The aim is to enhance the ecological systems of the city and by extension to reconcile the interface between man and nature