In a cemetery in Córdoba, Argentina, Esteras Perrote Studio builds PSJ Chapel: 40 square meters of white render, live-edge timber, and a circular ceiling oculus cut to frame the aguaribay tree above.
Cemeteries are already full of columns, crosses, stone niches, iron gates. What Esteras Perrote Studio chose to add was a white rendered cube, 40 square meters, placed in the grounds of a Córdoba cemetery beneath an aguaribay tree. The PSJ Chapel is not a monument in the traditional sense. It is a passage. Enter from the cemetery's interior courtyard, cross through, exit toward the street. The entire sequence takes less than a minute, which is exactly the point.
The exterior reads as two distinct volumes. The main cube sits open to the courtyard through a wide square portal, folding white louvred panels that pull back to expose the interior fully. The smaller street façade is sealed by full-height ribbed corrugated metal doors, painted white, set flush in the render plane. Both faces dissolve the boundary between enclosure and threshold. Neither is a wall in any permanent sense.
Inside, the material register is deliberately narrow. Plastered walls in off-white, the lower half banded with a fine vertically striated render texture that catches raking light differently than the smooth upper field. The floor is large-format grey tile. The one object in the space is a live-edge timber slab, bark still visible along one edge, dense and raw, functioning as altar, bench, resting place. Reeded cast-glass doors at the street end blur the cemetery beyond into a pale, moving field.
Above, a circular oculus is cut through the ceiling and splayed inward like a funnel. Through it, the branches of the aguaribay shade the room with shifting shadow. The studio describes the intervention as "a hole in the sky, an intersection like a cross, deducing the point of encounter between sky and Earth, between life and death." The framing is direct and unpretentious. The oculus does not aestheticize grief — it just holds the sky still long enough to notice it.
