Archinect - News

Soccer legend Pelé is laid to rest inside world's tallest cemetery in Santos, Brazil

2023-01-04T11:49:00-05:00

Pelé was a footballer like no other, and his final resting place will be exceptional too: a large replica stadium complete with artificial turf inside the world’s tallest vertical cemetery. The Brazilian football great, whose funeral was held Tuesday, bought his mausoleum 19 years ago inside the Memorial Ecumenical Cemetery, a high-rise building that holds the Guinness world record as the tallest cemetery in the world.

The “King of Football’s” 2,152-square-foot crypt is located inside the 32-story, 430,000-square-foot first-ever vertical cemetery in the world that features amenities like a 24/7 restaurant and indoor aviary.

Pelé said the apartment block-esque building offered more “spiritual peace and tranquility” over traditional graveyards. He was laid to rest alongside a former teammate, other family members, and the building’s 16,000-plus residents.

The funeral also provided Brazil's new President first public appearance while his predecessor watched in exile at a lesser-known sports champion's manse in Orlando.

New program created to protect African American burial grounds endangered by construction projects

2022-12-23T11:21:00-05:00

New federal legislation is set to be introduced which will help protect African American burial grounds impacted by new construction. The African American Burial Grounds Preservation Act is part of a series of measures expected to be signed into law by President Biden before the end of 2022 and is the result of five years of bipartisan efforts.

The act will create the African American Burial Grounds Preservation Program, which aims to identify burial grounds ahead of infrastructure projects and commercial development. It is hoped that the program will minimize construction delays on projects, as well as avoid “unnecessary community heartache.” The program will also assist descendants and communities in expressing their histories through grant money to identify, interpret, and preserve historic cemeteries.

“The African American Burial Grounds Preservation...

Hidden cartographies: the vanishing graves of the enslaved in Death Alley, Louisiana

2021-06-29T17:30:00-04:00

The London-based research group, Forensic Architecture (FA), published a new project on Monday, June 28, called “Environmental Racism in Death Alley, Louisiana,” which was featured by the New York Times.

A short documentary on the Times website tells the story of the fight to identify and preserve the graves of enslaved people in Louisiana’s Death Alley, also known as Cancer Alley. Between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, the area along the Mississippi River is known for its deadly concentration of polluting petrochemical facilities, which have led to high rates of cancer in the local, majority-Black population. According to advocates, identifying and preserving these burial sites is a way to memorialize the enslaved Black people who built Louisiana’s economy; it also raises awareness of the connection between current day structural racism and the history of capitalist development. Helping to identify and visualize the extent of these sites, FA mobilizes the architect’s tools in suppor...

The Stories of Beth Haim Brought to Life by Kossmanndejong and Loerakker Olsson Architects

2021-03-18T19:16:00-04:00

Designed by Kossmanndejong and Loerakker Olsson Architects, Beth Haim—Hebrew for ‘House of Life’—is one of the oldest Sephardic cemeteries in the world. The cemetery serves as a testament to the Portuguese and Jewish community of Amsterdam, displaying graves from the 17th century and beyond.

The interior of Beth Haim, a tribute to ‘House of Life’ with its light space featuring a large skylight and reflective ivory-glazed tiles. The horizontal screen is made of an introduction film—a narrating window to the cemetery behind. Photo courtesy of Kossmanndejong.

Photo courtesy of Kossmanndejong.

Kossmanndejong and Loerakker Olsson Architects sought to translate the transient nature of the historic cemetery onto the materials used in the design. Featuring a façade embedded with broken masonry, delicate natural stone features, and weathered brass doors upon entrance, this sense of transience is completed with the roof construction of untreated solid oak and benches to match.

Beth Haim, pavili...

Houston residents fight to save African American cemeteries

2020-01-10T15:08:00-05:00

The Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery, which sits in northeast Houston behind roads peppered with concrete plants and trucking depots, is just one of thousands of eroding African-American cemeteries across the state, in danger of being erased as descendants of those buried have died out, moved out or been pushed out. Many of the cemeteries are long gone. For years, mainstream historians didn’t pay attention to them; now genealogists, historians and families are rushing to save them.

The Houston Chronicle takes a look at the growing movement to rediscover and preserve the forgotten African American burial grounds of Texas by highlighting the story of the Pleasant Green-Culbertson cemetery.

The push to save and memorialize African American cemeteries is part of a larger national effort aimed at highlighting and preserving key aspects of American American history and culture at a time when many of these sites have been forgotten or are susceptible to being lost due to increased development.

...

Density in life and in death: A look at Hong Kong's towering cemeteries

2019-09-09T16:15:00-04:00

[Finbarr Fallon's] photo series Dead Space explores how these monuments are designed, and how their history contrasts with Hong Kong’s more modern developments. “I have always been intrigued by how city-specific cemetery design can be,” Fallon says via email. “While death is universal, its memorialization practices are not. I found it fascinating that extreme density and verticality continue to be a defining characteristic of Hong Kong’s dwellings for both the living and the dead.”

Hong Kong's towering high-rise cemeteries can reach up to 60-stories in height. Regarding the photo project, Fallon writes, “The images juxtapose residences for two diametrically opposed groups—the high-rises for the living, and graves for the dead."

The world's tallest columbarium is a glitzy "hotel for the dead"

2019-06-10T15:52:00-04:00

Nestled in the mountains near the northern coastline of Taiwan, just outside of its capital, is a tower that, once full, will house the ashes of 400,000 people. At 20 stories tall, the True Dragon Tower is the biggest columbarium in the world. It’s a striking manifestation of two problems plaguing countries all around Asia—a rapidly aging population, and a lack of space for the dead in urban centers.

Cultures around the world are currently dealing with a problem unique to the 21st century: the excessive use of land to bury the dead in the past has left little more for future generations. While cremation and the spreading of ashes has long acted as a measure against leaving a permanent mark on a site, there is still a significant majority that wish for a coordinate to call their own.

Interior of the Columbarium.

In response to its own land-use crisis, the city of Taipei has developed the True Dragon Tower, a 20-story building housing over the ashes of over 400,000 people. The building type is known as a columbarium, which traditionally organized with niches for funeral urns to be stored for visitors to attend as one might visit a cemetery. Given that over 90% of Taiwan's citizens prefer cremation over burial, it is little surprise that Taiwan became the home of the world's tallest columbarium.

True Dragon Tower has been described as a "hotel for the dead" by a spokeswoman for th...

Historic NYC African American burial ground marketed for $13.8M

2019-06-03T14:54:00-04:00

A site in Queens home to the United African Society of Newtown, the first community of free African Americans founded in New York State, is currently being marketed by real estate entity Cushman & Wakefield for $13.8 million as a development opportunity.

What's left of the 1828 community now exists on a mid-block plot of undeveloped land that contains, among other elements, a cemetery holding at least 300 graves. The community was founded the year after New York State abolished slavery in 1827. The site was once home to the Union African Church, a modest frame structure that served the community and administered the cemetery. According to 6sqft, construction workers in 2011 discovered the remains of Martha Peterson, a formerly-enslaved person who died in the 1850s from smallpox.

Historical photograph of the Union African Church that currently occupied the site, Image courtesy of EHCPS.

The nonprofit Elmhurst History & Cemeteries Preservation Society (EHCPS) is working to preserve an...

m2.senos creates a public restroom coated in green ceramic tile for a cemetery in Portugal

2017-10-26T14:32:00-04:00

The very first public toilets were introduced in 1851 in London’s Crystal Palace. George Jennings, a Brighton plumber, installed what he referred to as 'Monkey Closets' in the Retiring Rooms of the glass-and-iron hall for the Great Exhibition, where over 827,280 visitors paid a pretty penny to receive a clean seat, a towel, a comb, and a shoe shine. After the success of Jennings' lavatory, public restrooms began to appear in the streets and are today ubiquitous despite becoming a political battleground for civil rights, and facing persecution all over America, and beyond.

One might not naturally think of the restroom as a central design element, but the humble bathroom has been shaping the spaces we occupy since Jennings' Hyde Park innovation. For instance, toilets are one of the first elements drawn in the plans for high-rise buildings before tenant's needs are worked out. Beyond the functional, restrooms can be quite beautiful as well from the resid...

The open graves where New York buries its unclaimed bodies

2016-05-23T14:09:00-04:00

Twice a week or so, loaded with bodies boxed in pine, a New York City morgue truck passes through a tall chain-link gate and onto a ferry that has no paying passengers. Its destination is Hart Island, an uninhabited strip of land off the coast of the Bronx in Long Island Sound, where overgrown 19th-century ruins give way to mass graves gouged out by bulldozers and the only pallbearers are jail inmates paid 50 cents an hour. There, divergent life stories come to the same anonymous end.

"New York is unique among American cities in the way it disposes of the dead it considers unclaimed: interment on a lonely island, off-limits to the public, by a crew of inmates. Buried by the score in wide, deep pits, the Hart Island dead seem to vanish — and so does any explanation for how they came to be there."

Be forewarned: it's a pretty grim read. Unclaimed bodies tend to have tragic backstories, providing a portrait of a city that provides few resources to its most vulnerable inhabitants: the mentally ill, homeless, elderly, and impoverished.

"In the face of an end-of-life industry that can drain the resources of the most prudent, these people are especially vulnerable," writes author Nina Bernstein.

For more on spaces devoted to the deceased, check out these links:

Approaching a multilayered death at Aldo Rossi’s cemetery

2015-09-17T13:37:00-04:00

Aldo Rossi’s addition to the San Cataldo Cemetery is a paragon of postmodern architecture, seeing the cemetery up close exposes some of the style’s major shortcomings. [...] all you’ve got left is a half-empty, unfinished cemetery with assorted maintenance equipment left lying around. Perhaps you can keep drawing meaning from this decay. But lord knows it’s difficult to sustain a deep engagement with life and death after you’ve tripped over a garden hose.

Related on Archinect:

They died as they designed: famous architects' self-styled gravestones

2015-03-25T14:48:00-04:00

Le Corbusier designed a pair of markers in the style of one of his own concrete architectural models. Carlo Scarpa, who was buried standing up and wrapped in linen in the style of a medieval knight, has a marble grave with a maze-like design. Frank Lloyd Wright's marker could not even be called a gravestone, because it looks more like an uncut rock. Meanwhile, Buckminster Fuller's grave has an esoteric quote he once gave to Playboy magazine inscribed on it: "Call me Trimtab."

Sure, an article like this suggests a click bait-y listicle, heavy on images and light on content. But what's installed astride an architect's final resting place is of grave (pardon the pun) importance. Not only would it be surrealistically disorienting to have an architect's professional style countered by an antithetical gravesite, but it also smacks of lost opportunity – this is the final personal statement, in a way, that an architect can make.

It's also heartening to realize that even when they died unexpectedly, these architects had their plans sorted. Check out their graves below (a wholehearted and respectful h/t to Curbed for sourcing most of the images):

Alvar Aalto, Hietaniemi cemetery in Helsinki, Finland:

Bruce Goff, Chicago's Graceland cemetery:

Adolf Loos, Zentralfriedhof in Vienna, Austria:

Buckminster Fuller, Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts:

Frank Lloyd Wright (first grave), Unity Chapel Cemetery in Wyoming, Wisconsin (According to Curbed, FLW's final r...

Archinect Sessions Episode #20: Three Funerals and a Curator

2015-03-12T18:01:00-04:00

Ten minutes before we sat down to record this week's episode, the Pritzker Prize Laureate was announced – posthumously. The winner, Frei Otto (1925 - 2015), was a German architect whose impressive work and research with lightweight and sustainable structures influenced countless architects through the 20th century to today. Otto was informed of the prize before his death in Germany this past Monday, March 9, prompting the Pritzker committee to make the formal announcement the day after.

This episode, we reflect on Otto's remarkable life and the Prize's announcement in the midst of his passing. We also examine the uncertain fate (and value) of Frank Gehry's Winton Guest House, which will be up for sale on May 19, and consider whether architects should shoulder the cultural and emotional weight of deciding how we bury our dead.

And on the heels of Google's announcement that BIG will collaborate with Heatherwick Studios on their campus expansion, Amelia spoke with curator Brooke Hodge i...

Seattle architect seeks to redesign America's burial landscape

2015-03-04T13:30:00-05:00

Seattle-based architect [Katrina Spade], originally from New England, has a vision that could radically reshape not just the death-care industry but the way we think about death itself. She calls her plan the Urban Death Project, and it proposes a middle road between burial and cremation: compost. [...] The centerpiece of the idea is an approximately three-story-high building in an urban center where people could bring their dead.

The New Urban Cemetery

2014-09-09T13:06:00-04:00

The idea of the Future Cemetery is to create a place for people to connect with death. What that actually means and looks like is still in development, Troyer says, but in the first stage of the project they did everything from projections to audio installations. Now, they’re working on developing augmented reality experiences in cemeteries—elements that are only visible with certain devices and if you know they’re there. The idea is to allow people to add to their own cemetery experience...

Editor's Picks #332

2013-09-10T11:11:00-04:00

Orhan Ayyüce penned a remembrance to his friend architect Larry Totah, titled Slow Weather of Architecture. Therein he describes "The House"...overlooking Pacific Ocean rather edgewise and build like a long drawing depicting a horizontally composed architecture. The fog, roof and the walls are more of Chumash hiring Hopi to build on their mountains for few exquisite basket full of shellfish to adorn the wedding dresses in Hopi villages like the ones a Don Juan dreamed of, a fair exchange"...

Amelia Taylor-Hochberg interviewed architectural photographer Bilyana Dimitrova, formerly Metropolis Magazine’s photo editor. The two discussed Architecture Photography in the 21st Century ahead of the exhibition 'Beyond the Assignment: Defining Photographs of Architecture and Design' which will be presented by the Julius Shulman Institute at Woodbury University, October 5 - November 1, 2013.

Orhan Ayyüce penned a remembrance to his friend architect Larry Totah, titled Slow Weather of Architecture. Therein he describes "The House" which "continuously frames and de-frames itself in three or four sets of axis minded passages. In the front, overlooking Pacific Ocean rather edgewise and build like a long drawing depicting a horizontally composed architecture. The fog, roof and the walls are more of Chumash hiring Hopi to build on their mountains for few exquisite basket full of shellfish to adorn the wedding dresses in Hopi villages like the ones a Don Juan dreamed of, a fair ...

‘Thresholds’ marks the unmarked at Kent cemetery

2013-09-05T14:20:00-04:00

“It is amazing to realize you could walk around the site not knowing if there is a body underneath you,” Nelson said. “How do you commemorate that?”

Of the approximately 200 people buried at Saar Pioneer Cemetery, there are 89 unmarked graves, each unable to inform visitors of their presence and the role they played in Kent history. Collaborative artists Frances Nelson and Bradly Gunn seek to mark the unmarked by creating a series “thresholds” to walk under and pass through, as an acknowledgement of the final resting place of Kent’s founding pioneers.

THRESHOLDS is generously supported by 4Culture’s Site Specific Program and the University of Washington’s College of Built Environment’s Digital Fabrication Lab, with additional support from McLendon Hardware, Dunn Lumber and Miller Paint Co.