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...

Anglo-Saxon burial ground uncovered during work on Britain's HS2 railway

2022-06-17T16:57:00-04:00

“A vast Anglo-Saxon burial site containing 138 graves has been unearthed by archaeologists working on the HS2 cross-country rail route under construction across the UK. The site, near Wendover in Buckinghamshire, contains the remains of more than 140 people, some of which were buried with jewellery, knives and a personal grooming kit. “It is one of the best and most revealing post-Roman sites in the country,” says the historian Dan Snow.”

According to a statement by HS2, the site contained 138 graves, with 141 inhumation burials and five cremation burials, making it one of the largest Anglo-Saxon burial grounds ever uncovered in Britain. According to Rachel Wood, the lead archaeologist for Fusion JV, the company behind the fieldwork, Anglo-Saxon cemeteries are rare. The items uncovered date back to the 5th and 6th century, a period in which there are gaps in historical and archaeological record. Nearly three quarters of the graves contained high quality items, including jewelry, swords, shields, spears, and personal grooming items such as ear wax removers and tweezers, suggesting the site was the resting place for a wealthy community.

Additionally, nearly all of the burials were found with decorated brooches on their collarbone, indicating they were holding up garments such as cloaks or peplos, a long garment worn by women with shoulder brooches. This archaeological find was discovered similarly to that of a well-p...

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...

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.

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New pyramid, older than Giza, discovered 20 miles south of Cairo

2017-04-04T13:48:00-04:00

Archeaologists have discovered what appears to be the first attempt at a smooth-sided pyramid in Egypt. The pyramid is estimated to be 3,700 years old (about 200 years older than Giza), and although no elaborately-outfitted burial chambers have been found yet, the team is still excavating in an attempt to determine the full size of the pyramid. According to the Associated Press, it's located 20 miles south of Cairo in the sleepy burial community of the Dahshur necropolis, which has long been home to graves of royal courtiers and other high-society movers and shakers.

Architect proposes turning dead humans into compost

2015-03-08T18:49:00-04:00

"I know this is going to be an offensive simplification of the value of a human body," she (Carpenter-Boggs) wrote in an e-mail, "but one could compare the fertilizer value to 100 pounds of cottonseed meal." She linked to a bag of "6-2-1" cottonseed-meal fertilizer on sale at Amazon.com. "Which, from this source, would be two of the 50-pound bags = $144" Of course, the nutrient value of human beings as soil is only a small component of the Urban Death Project's overall mission.

A somewhat long-read on a proposal for turning dead human bodies into compost, and the young architect who is proposing a structure for cities to do so. Check out more renderings and information at Urban Death Project.

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...