Pessoal House / COM/O atelier

Located in Alto de São João cemetery in Lisbon, CASA DO PESSOAL has housed for several decades the crematorium workers’ changing rooms and a workshop for maintaining small elements of the cemetery. The existing building was in a terrible state of conservation and the spaces did not have the best conditions for their users. It was interesting for us to understand how to design a building to serve the daily life of living human beings that work and deal every day with death. Inspired by both spaces’ atmosphere and overlooking the river Tagus, this new space provides an escape for the cemetery workers' hard work daily life and death environment. It is a building for life within death.