tower urn by chee meng cheong from singapore

In the Chinese culture, the process of honoring ancestors is an act of filial piety, a tradition that aligns oneself to something larger in the intangible context.
However, this important tradition had taken its toll on the land scarce country and cities which are highly populated by ethnic Chinese. Public Columbarium had run out of niche space and potential land for development of columbarium, while niche spaces in private columbarium are too costly for the low to middle income group for an alternative option, not leaving out the sprouting of illegal columbarium in heartland area.
With the forecast of a surging death rate in the next few years, the development of more columbarium and cemetery do not seem to be an answer to the pressing issue.
Tower Urn is an architecture inspired modular containment of six or more individual space designed for placement in the house and colombarium. User could choose the different module to build a customized family urn. The design calls for the community acceptance of a more collective and sustainable measure of handling cremain yet maintaining an honoring point. One of the many advantage of the tower urn is the consolidation of urns to form a single entity instead of the current practice where urns of the same family members are scatter thru out the columbarium or at most kept at 4 units.
The concept does not seek to replace existing measures implemented by the local authorities, but instead delay the handling of cremain to a later generation which would have little/zero attachment with the subject.
It would have a big emotional distress if one is to scatter the cremain of parent into the sea due to high cost and shortage of niche space. An honoring point in the Chinese context is important to ease the emotional distress of individual and to show filial piety. Hypothetically this could be a main reason for low acceptance of sea scattering method in Hong Kong (5% of total death rate).
When the containment is stored with six cremain and a new death occurs, the urns in the top of the hierarchy would be dispose through different alternatives such as sea scattering, parkland burial, underwater burial, slingshot into space etc, or simply add in modules allowed until the maximum stated by a prefix regulation of maybe 10. However, the person disposing the cremain in most cases would be the great great-grand children of the cremain in the top hierarchy for whom had little to zero emotional attachment, the delay actually transfer the role to a later generation decreasing the emotional attachment substantially.