Archinect - Features

Gehry Prize Winners Reimagine Funerary Architecture

2022-12-12T18:12:00-05:00

Thesis projects aim to push students outside of their comfort zones and foster new versions of architectural thinking. For our latest installment of Archinect's Thesis Review series, SCI-Arc M.Arch graduates Ian Wong and Sue Choi discuss the architectural tones and typologies of cemeteries and funerary customs in their project, Earthly Passage.

Winners of the 2022 Gehry Prize for best thesis project, Wong and Choi explained, "Earthly Passage is a new model of funerary architecture." While their topic may seem unconventional, the duo explains the importance of exploring and respecting these spaces for the deceased. Their project exhibits a place for "funerals to take place, as well as subsequent visits," highlighting improved experiences for mourners to pay their respects. They continue by adding, "culturally, our thesis highlights a program or function of space/architecture that is often uncomfortable, or taboo, to talk about."

During this interview, they discuss their motivation to...

Centre Georges Pompidou or a Cemetery, Aldo Rossi's Fork in the Road

2018-10-12T09:00:00-04:00

From the Ground Up is a series on Archinect focused on discovering the early stages & signs of history's most prolific architects. Starting from the beginning allows us to understand the long journey architecture takes in even the formative of hands and often, surprising shifts that occur in its journey. These early projects grant us a glimpse into the early, naive, ambitious and at points rough edges of soon to be architectural masters.

In this installment we look at Aldo Rossi and his San Cataldo Cemetery. While not his first project under his own name, it would become the project tied to the progression and growth of his career and one of his largest impacts on the discipline as a whole.

Student Works: Martin McSherry's "Vertical Graveyards"

2014-02-12T10:06:00-05:00

Martin McSherry’s “The Vertical Graveyards” is a speculative proposal for a new infrastructure of death, mimicking the skyscraper as a symbol of expanding and densifying urban systems. Currently an MArch student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, McSherry initially drafted the project as a proposal to the Nordic Association for Graveyards and Crematoria’s “The Graveyards of the Future” competition. Imagining the cemetery as vertical and central, rather than horizontal and suburban, the project focuses less on design specifics and more on provoking a change in societal attitudes towards death.