Baba Beski's Garden

Dr. Gholamali Beski, appearing on national TV always wearing his signature white clothes, speaking passionately about how natural resources are in immediate danger. A physician and environmentalist that, during his lifetime, turned into a sort of modern-day mystic Sheikh. After his death, his immediate family commissioned ZAV Architects to design and build a tomb for him inside the large natural garden where he used to live. He spent his days in his house. ZAV Architects proposed to redesign the garden as a space open to public, this way, His tomb would be extended from the limited space of his grave to a whole garden, as a living memorial where his many fans can remember him in its every corner, in an almost pilgrimage-like experience. Baba Beski's body is buried next to spaces of his everyday living. He is thought to be perished but he is also growing into the living texture of vegetation that make the garden be. This vicinity of life and death, this entanglement of two seemingly but not necessarily opposite concepts, is what interested us in the design process. In re-designing the garden, man-made structures and nature morph into one another, in a perpetual limbo state between perishing (towards death and nothingness) and incompleteness (towards life and growth). The aspiration to design incompleteness resulted physically in a structure made of woven rebar. With its surface gradually rusting and greenery climbing and covering it as time goes by, it changes incessantly, displaying an ambiguous and ghost-like look that is unfinished and vague. At its current state, the garden is open to public, the tomb has been built while more constructions might be on the way.