Archinect - Features

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.

CONTOURS: What Should Architecture Occupy? Part Two

2011-11-07T12:00:00-05:00

Of course, we know why architects are quiet on these fundamental issues of wealth and inequality. On the one hand they are just too busy trying to run their businesses and chase after ever fewer projects for less and less money. The other reason is that architects depend on the wealthiest segments of society for their livelihoods. Thus it seems to provide an obvious reason not to support a movement that stands for social and economic justice and an end to rules that favor corporations, banks and wealthy individuals over “everyone else.” Again, if you aren’t sure what the ruckus is all about, you can do some investigating on your own—start by reading outside the architectural press.

CONTOURS: What Should Architecture Occupy? Part One

2011-10-31T12:00:00-04:00

Unless you’ve been living under a very remote rock, you know by now that the OWS, or Occupy Wall Street movement, with its many offshoots including Occupy the Hood, has been continued for over a month, now. And what’s more, unless you are independently wealthy or a trustfund baby (and are therefore the “1%”), you are also part of the 99% of the population whom this collective movement addresses.