Modular columbarium
Hexagons that clip to each other on a base. It grows as demand arrives, it comes apart, and standing in a garden it stops looking like a cemetery.
A columbarium is a wall of niches. And a wall can only be made one way: by building it.
That obvious fact organises the whole sector. If the columbarium is building work, you have to put the whole thing up before knowing how many urns it will receive, it cannot grow, it cannot be moved, and aesthetically it can only be what it is, a slab with pigeonholes. The cemetery ends up designed by the concrete. The reframing was to treat the niche as a loose piece instead of a hole in a wall. Independent hexagons, a joining piece that clips them together and a shared base: it assembles without building work, grows by modules and comes apart. In a garden it stops looking like a cemetery, and that change of appearance is not cosmetic, it is what lets a family visit without the weight of walking into a funeral home.
Why a hexagon
It is not decoration. It is the only shape that tiles the plane without wasting surface, and it spreads the load between neighbours, which is what allows modules to be stacked without an added supporting structure.
The joining piece
What is registered is not the hexagon, it is the system: the clip between modules and the seating on the base. Without that piece they are expensive flowerpots.
It grows with demand
A council does not have to forecast twenty years ahead or tie up budget in capacity it will not use. It buys the modules it needs and adds the next ones when they are needed.
Hexagons, joining piece and base, drawing from the specification