A Better Place Forest

A guest’s arrival means that they are coming to visit, and perhaps even confront, powerful memories of beloved family and friends. This tenuous, and perhaps even frightening, first step requires a reassuring degree of permanence and stability while also opening out into the dynamism of the forest beyond. 

To arrive at the site, individuals and families first turn onto an entry road descending into the site and arrive at a visitors’ center, designed in collaboration with Openscope Studio. A pathway of pentagonal concrete pavers leads to a small bridge in front of the building. Sited at the crest of a second hill, this singular building is a place of orientation on the threshold between public space and the transition into a more private experience of memory and memorial. The deck and two small meeting rooms provide space for families to gather for ceremonies or to meet with forest stewards. Within the ever-changing forest, the materiality of the visitors’ center conveys a reassuring sense of permanence—that it always has and always will sit on this site. A deep, folded Corten steel roof shades and protects the building. The steel will weather naturally, along with the locally-harvested and milled redwood decking and siding. Carefully-oriented redwood fins screen the glass-enclosed meeting rooms while capturing views outward. Amidst this place of reassuring permanence, it was key to also invite the forest in and provoke the idea of immersion and suspension, allowing tension between solidity and levity. As such, the visitor center was designed with a portal in its center and a bridge that leads to a promontory, framing the forest, that is situated on axis with the center of the memorial meadow. The overlook is suspended above the forest floor, a critical moment of levitation that initiates a sequence of sublime experiences for each visitor. First the visitor is floating above the forest, an observer of the ecology, separate from the sacred spaces beyond. 

After visitors are welcomed at the center and given digital and analog maps of the property’s trails and spaces, they descend down the hillside; the topography is sculpted to conceal the memorial spaces beyond. Just as one recalls memories and feels the emotions of the past and present, a full reveal is never complete or comprehensive, but unfolds and reveals itself slowly in fragments and pieces. This three-fold strategy of framing, threshold, and invitation modulates and becomes a patterned experience as one moves through the landscape. In this way, our design strategy aimed to develop a physical and natural lattice of ceremony and the experience of memory across the senses. 

As the visitor becomes immersed in the forest, and a part of the forest—an extension of its living structures, the topography slopes down and gives way to a meadow. The physical opening up of the landscape mirrors the emotional opening of memory. As the expanse of recollection opens both physically and emotionally, guests encounter a memorial design by Andrew Kudless nestled in the meadow. A series of cast-concrete benches, inscribed with the names of family members and placed to recall a tree’s growth rings, reverberate through a meditative walking path whose worn edges are infilled with regionally endemic creeping and self-sowing plants. The center of the memorial is sited on-axis with a view of the sea, representing infinity and serving as a metaphor for memories’ unique capacity for unboundedness and compartmentalization. The memorial site also marks a point of individual and collective reflection through physical grounding and outward inspection of place.

An enduring marker, which needed to be both permanent and subtle so as not to clutter the forest, is placed at each family’s selected tree. After multiple studies, we found inspiration in the very signs that demarcate our own cultural organization of forests—survey markers. At the base of a tree, one will find a bronze survey marker that is inscribed with a number, the person’s name, and a quote. In this sacred forest each tree represents the life of an individual, a couple, or a family; any cultural or familial meaning that is assigned by its human occupants. Where immersion into the forest and the transition into deeper recollection and thought means that the scale and type of materials falls away to foreground the forest, it is at the critical encounter with a loved one’s tree that a discrete, physical marker grounds a visitor and concretely expresses the placement of remains to be taken up by the forest.

From the root base of the tree, then looking up to the sky through a network of branches to the canopy of the trees above, one feels immersed in this sacred space. The forest captures the identity of our communities, our families and our homes—each a network, an ecology of its own—while representing individual life. There is an innate sense of belonging, and beauty in being a part of this habitat now, a memorial that will outlast one’s stay.

This network of trails and openings flows with the land, and the design seeks to shepherd and choreograph that flow. Every detail, from the landscape and architecture to the signage and memorial markers, works to establish a quiet and reverent human experience through feedback between human and non-human life. While each forest cemetery implemented by the Better Place Forest has a unique character, the underpinning vision remains: to preserve and honor the transcendent beauty of the landscape and ultimately the people who choose this forest as their final resting place.