en.Wedoany.com Reported - Worrell Yeung Architecture (based in Brooklyn and a long-time member of the AN Interior Top 50) is renovating a historic chapel and designing a new community center for Evergreens Cemetery in New York, USA. The cemetery spans 225 acres across Brooklyn and Queens and was established in 1849.

Understory Landscape Architecture will be responsible for enhancing the cemetery's solemn and majestic rural green spaces, originally designed by architect Andrew Jackson Downing.

"We've worked on many different types of projects: apartments, art spaces, agricultural centers. But never one so focused on life's greatest challenge—death," Max Worrell and Jejon Yeung told AN.

The architects stated that the goal is to consider the "sensitivity and programmatic complexity" of the project and to "strike a perfect balance between solemnity and celebration."

At Evergreens Cemetery, Worrell Yeung envisions a new event hall that includes administrative spaces, archival storage, meeting rooms, a lobby with a gallery, and public restrooms. The building will be named Grace Hall in honor of one of the cemetery's founders.

A chapel built in 1850 and designed by Alexander Jackson Davis, later reconstructed and currently used as office space, will be restored and transformed into the cemetery's visitor center.

The new building will be clad in local Jet Mist granite tiles and will connect to the lower level of the chapel. The chapel already features Jet Mist granite tiles, so the material choice reinforces continuity between old and new.

The largest space in the new building will be a double-height, wood-lined sanctuary for memorials, celebrations of life, community board meetings, exhibitions, and educational programs. Topping it is a wooden truss roof with a continuous skylight.

An interior courtyard designed by Understory Landscape Architecture will feature a water feature for reflection and contemplation.

Worrell Yeung is also designing a new observation deck for stargazing during events hosted by the Amateur Astronomers Association.

Programmatically, the Evergreens Cemetery project is similar to the new building designed by Architecture Research Office and Michael van Valkenburgh Associates for Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, or the welcome center recently designed by Snow Kreilich Architects for Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis.

At Green-Wood Cemetery, Lakewood Cemetery, and now Evergreens Cemetery, new spaces invite the public to engage with historic resting places, thereby activating cemeteries as gathering spaces.

"We designed this project not only to honor the rich history of Evergreens Cemetery but also to look toward the future and the present," Worrell and Yeung said. "Cemeteries can be complex spaces: people come here to grieve, laugh, celebrate, pay tribute, and heal."

The architects added: "We hope to design a space where the living can come together to appreciate the beauty of this land and life, while realizing how fleeting and precious our time is."

Construction is set to begin later this year.