just wondering if any archinecters share my obsession.
of course, my interest originates from the landscape side, but architects and planners ought to find them intriguing too.
and yet, a curiously neglected subject in the design world (with some notable exceptions.) could it have anything to do with a little cultural discomfort with, oh say maybe, mortality?
nitpicker, My friend had done a thesis in college on crematoriums.
Its a very interesting, diverse and yes ur right ,Its quite an unexplored topic .
If you study history, Death (burial,cremation ) etc has been iconised in the past more than now.
One of the most celebrated and most recognisable set of monuments in the world is actually a royal cemetary ( The Giza Pyramids ) .A small fact which escapes most at the first thought of it.
If you encompass "death" as dealt with in all cultures throughout ages, I would say that there is no "cultural" discomfort as you mentioned, rather human psychological discomfort.
of course but then culture is something very human.
Just a small bit of trivia : Most of the adherents of the Zoroastrian religion neither cremate nor bury , they dispose of the dead to birds of prey.
Its followed sometimes by tibetan buddhists too.
In Bombay, The structure where the zoroastrian last rites are commited is called the "Tower of Silence".
It may sound cruel but their philosophy is something like
1) thats like the final act of charity , a human can get done
2) none of the 5 elements-earth ,water,air,fire or ether should be contaminated directly with death...
There's quite an eco-friendly angle to that ancient way of thinking.
My thesis was a cemetery. Ive studied practically every death rite from neanderthals to cryogenics. Traditional burial is actually a bit of a latecomer in the grand scheme of things. Cremation is far more prevalent historically. As is floor burial in homes and even cannibalism if Im not mistaken. Some fun ones are the hanging coffins of western china, lantern boats in coastal japan, the pyres of varanasi. In precolonial Hawaii, it was believed that the potency of ones soul was carried in thier bones, and so to capture and possess the bones of one's enemies was to capture thier soul's energy. While kings could afford year round armed guards at thier tombs, the general population was forced to hide thier burials, and created elaborate code-songs to pass down the secret locations of thier ancestors burials to only the most trusted family members. When anthropologists studied the burial of neanderthals in caves, they discovered not only were the bodies laid out in patterns, but immense amounts of pollen and seed matter mixed with the soil around the bodies. The bodies had either laid upon or completely covered in dense beds of flowers. In fact, the very first permanent architecture was that of tombs. When sedentary civilization began to form, we didnt build homes of our own, we moved in as guests in the houses of the dead.
Ha I could go on all night...
But yes. I would have to agree there is a general social aversion to death in modern society (real death that is, I wrote a whole section our subconscious redirection toward media-sensationalized death in the news, TV, horror films, etc.), and yes it is a rather recent development. Weve gotten so its barely socially acceptable to even use the word, its always, in a quieted and almost shameful tone, "passed away" or "no longer with us". Its no longer treated as a natural function, but as some kind of shameful disease. With religion quickly dissipating as a reliable authority on mortality, the growing centrality of materialism in our culture, our ability to understand and accept something as existentially confounding as death has fallen too. And its a terribly insidious failure. Our elders are hidden away in nursing homes, pumped full of pills and tubes and wires and machines and plastic coated devices of every sort, right till the dying breath, all surrounded in the antiseptic polish of stainless steel and white-washed walls, denied not only an honorable natural death, but the nobility of ones final wisdom-bearing years and decades, just so we can avoid the 'unpleasantness' of being reminded of our mortal nature. Its truly despicable.
Worse than that perhaps, the general denial of death leaves us emotionally unequipped to deal with death when it inevitably comes. Beyond hurried wake services death becomes an almost entirely individual burden to bear. Our customs are so out of date, so neglected, we no longer have any macro-social mechanism for dealing with it all. How can a cemetery be practical when families are spread all over the country and world? Our crematory operators where lab-coats for chris'sake. The corporate funeral home replaced the custom of being laid out in the family home, whole communities coming to living rooms to pay respects.
It even erodes our moral character. With the mortal strand severed, in what framework are we to understand consequences beyond our own lifetimes? Without a clear understanding of our ancestors, how may we project our own impact on the generations ahead?
Anyway, thats just my rant. Actually 90% of my thesis dealt more with the metaphysical problem of creating a place of literal communion between living and dead. From a temporal, spatial, semantic standpoint its a total brainfuck.
Weve gotten so its barely socially acceptable to even use the word, its always, in a quieted and almost shameful tone, "passed away" or "no longer with us".
I dont think that should be called shameful, i think its more to do with politeness...which ur right again ..is to provide a buffer for something unpleasant.
The tibetan buddhists have a phrase (which I think is very beautiful )when they refer to someone dead , they say :-
"he/she has gone beyond sorrow."
anyways, oe those were Fantastic thoughts of yours. Could you share some more of your thesis ?
oe, wonderful post. I enjoyed raeding it and agree with pretty much all you've said. I do think nevermore is right that euphemisms are used out of politeness toward the person you're talking too. I once worked with a African man - it was years ago but I think he was from Zimbabwe? - who was appalled when I told him I wanted to be cremated but didn't care hat happened to the ashes. He had very strongly cultural opinions regarding death and the treatment of the body and was upset that I was so cavalier about it. Just a cultural disconnect, I should have been more sensitive to his opinion.
I did a semester abroad in Vienna and spent a LOT of time in the big cemetery there, the Zentralfriedhof, where Beethoven and other famous people are buried and the architecture of the tombs/chapels is amazingly diverse. Also went out to the burbs to see Egon Schiele's grave. Vienna is a good "death city".
Of course Plecnik's Zale Cemetery in Llubljana was one of the big high points of my time abroad: his work there is mouth-droppingly bizarre and wonderful.
Philly's historic cemeteries are also supposedly wonderful though I never spent any time in them. I think Furness has a big tomb for himself there?
A friend and I in school talked about designing a building with a cornerstone containing a chamber for our ashes to be deposited in after we died. Or more perversly, in a doorknob. A cool idea, but these days I'm more of a "scatter to the winds" attidute.
I grew up on a farm with a cemetary on it. We were the caretakers of it. All the graves were 1860-1920 or so, hardly anyone came by to visit, but usually someone did on Memorial Day. There is an old foundation for a church too, and we had old photos of it. Lutheran of course. I planted flowers up there and went there to muse when worldly things got me down. Might be buried there myself. The first burial in over 100 years.
"the general denial of death leaves us emotionally unequipped to deal with death when it inevitably comes. "
so we were 'then' equipped and 'now' not? to pile upon the mountain of 'thens vs nows' . in any case, all equipment is for the purpose of avoiding death. this is exactly what drove humans to make tools/equipments in the first place. those two colours don't mix in a meaning. emotionally equiped for death...:)
marketable.
I do recognize the euphemisms as conventions of politeness, I use them myself. Of course there is sadness involved, if nothing else just in knowing it will be a long time, if ever, that we will see them again. Its not the words so much that bother me but the tone. If a friend was leaving to join thier family and take a fantastic job in a foreign country and you may never see them again, would you speak about it with such a quieted voice?
Anyway, Im sure I could dig up some images for you guys. I actually spent 70% of my time working on this giant funeral home and crematorium on an islet adjacent to the site. The idea was that it was a small hotel for funerals, 12 rooms and a guest house, that several families at a time could come for 3 days or a week to remember someone in a beautiful place. It had a large hearth space for receptions, dining halls, wake halls and a mortuary. Right facing it and reaching out into the water was a large crematory, a library for photo albums and a dock built for a specially designed funerary catamaran for the spreading of ashes at sea. Somehow it became really absurdly enormous. I needed the scale for psychological effect, and it just got taller and taller until it was practically comic. I had this idea that I could take the typology of a ghost town, turn it inside-out and occupy the dead space. I spent all this time working with symbology, conscripting the spatial structure of afterlife myths into real space, these really silly post-modern ideas about form, but quickly learned the most potent emotional communicators were just brute environmental effects; light, temperature, tactility, a fog, the roar of the ocean or the view of the sunrise. The cemetery itself was on an abandoned WWII battery in Kittery Maine called Fort Foster, looking out across the Piscatiqua and the Isle of Shoals. I occupied the old fortifications and sighting towers for crypts, large community urns, an outdoor chapel, just clustering on these fortified knolls between walkpaths through the wetlands. The thing was really bonkers actually...
Cellar, I am probably romanticising a bit, but there did used to be a much more comfortable relationship with death. I would argue it was more honest, and more graceful than is today's, but perhaps I myself am overly comfortable.
There is a great deal of difference between making tools to improve one's life, and making tools to simply to avoid death.
I also love cemetaries, and my favorite of all would have to be Greenwood Cemetary, here in Brooklyn. Greenwood is expansive, and has dozens of fine examples of Victorian tombs, and many Neo-Egyptian graves as well. It is impressive not only for it's size and beauty, but also for the number of famous New Yorker's taking their final nap their. Louis C Tiffany and 'Boss' Tweed have two of my favorite graves. The chapels and mausoleums come in many different styles, so you can see quite a few different examples of Victorian death culture all in one day. On top of all this, Greenwood has got to be one of the most peaceful, well kept spaces in all of NYC. I highly reccomend a visit, or a tour if the timing is right.
wow, I wish I had time to respond in detail to all the posts here. YES, I have found others who share my obsession!
I grew up about half a mile from Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. Used to ride my bike there and wander around looking at all the monuments. I am sure it was an early influence in many ways. I wasn't exactly a Goth kid or obsessed with death (actually I pre-date the Goth thing by a bit, ahem); I was obssessed with history; trying to understand these bygone people is like peering through the wrong end of a telescope, they seem further away than they really are.
oe, I too would like to hear more about your thesis and "literal communication between the living and the dead", this is a major issue in my thinking about the subject.
liminality between the world of the living and the dead, the above ground and below ground - seems to me this is a major part of the power of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
and interesting, in this connection, to think about the 9/11 families who got up in arms protesting about the Arad memorial design - that it was "underground", dark, hidden, limited, shameful, and they repeat over and over again that they want the memorial to be in the "light of day." of course, people said the same damn things about maya lin's work, that it was dark and shameful and depressing, until it was built and became so beloved.
however, this is also conflating memorials and cemeteries, which overlap but are not the same thing or dealing with the same sets of issues.
interesting that the first response I got was a post about the zoroastrians' towers of silence. just a couple weeks ago I read an AP story about how there is a serious issue with the towers of silence...not enough vultures. No, really. The vultures are endangered, various things like pesticide posioning have been doing them in, and there are not enough vultures around to do the job. You can imagine the results. there was a woman who caused a scandal by scaling the towers of silence to take photos and do an expose on the conditions up there. pretty horrifying stuff.
"in the 19th c it wasn't uncommon for some to dress up, pose, and take portraits of their dead kin."
i watched the others too. nicole looked a pale eylelid.
in my culture, family is thrown one atop the other . the son on his dad. the gene pool literally pooling back together. a landscraper tower of bodies that generated each other, and degenrates into each other.
the same flat rectangle of earth pierced by a familial axis of deaths.
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
--Philip Larkin, "Church Going"
sometimes I find one must go straight to poetry in order to think about death...
anyway, the full poem, though I didn't post it here, is worth reading. it's about stopping into an old church and wondering what will become of it when belief totally fades away, -that people will still have some kind of dim awareness of what it represents about the continuity of life and death.
**
as for whether we once had a more "comfortable" relationship with death, I wouldn't put it quite that way...I don't think the human relationship with death has ever been comfortable, and why on earth should it? There have been different sets of rituals in the past (though it's a mistake to think, at least in American history, that there has been some sort of stable tradition) and now our relationship with death rituals has gone fairly screwy. See Mitford's "American Way of Death", still required reading on the subject despite some biases and unnecessary snideness. we're pretty much left with an orgy of conspicuous consumption (which of course is a disaster from a ecological point of view) and some unsustainable land-use practices to boot.
though I too love cemeteries as green open space, at least the good ones. and the older historical ones, like mount auburn, have developed a certain level of programming to make themselves relevant to more than the history buffs; mount auburn is a big favorite with birdwatchers for one thing, and they've done quite a bit to encourage that.
of course the british, who have much much older churchyards to deal with, have done quite a bit more to rethink their churchyards as wildlife sanctuaries. it filled me with great delight to read the observations of the British Lichen Society about the importance of churchyards as lichen habitat - did you realize that different lichens like to live on different parts of gravestones? google "living churchyards" for more fun with churchyards as habitat.
which brings it all back to the Larkin poem and wondering what use these grounds wind up being as time goes by; how can we use them to maintain our connection to the past and also as an amenity for the present?
I too did my thesis on a cemetery. Infact, I did it only because our thesis theme was to do something along a highway. I happened to despised highways after learning its the history. So in order to satisfy the requirements of a highway, I understood the subways and trains as an inner highway to the city.
Furthermore, to make a long story short, I chose the #4 four line in New York Ciry endingthe Bronx at Woodlawn Cemetery. I found it very interesting that a train track would end at the begining of a cemetery. So after my research. I began to understand the cemetery as an inner edge to the city where as the board walk is an outer edge.
Most communities here in the US tend to not understand the cemetery, and cast it aside as a seperate organism, but infact it should be the opposite. growing up in the Caribbean showed another perspective on the relationship of the cemetery to the community. It aslo geve me atremendous drive to explore a world that most of us haven't a clue about.
I think I ike cemeteries most because of their history and the stories that come with them. Also, they are very spiritual environmentsand we can learn alot from them
One of the oddest cemeteries I know consists of only one grave. When the woman was orginally interred, her grave was on a fairly bucolic knoll overlooking the Raritan River, in mid Jersey. A pretty standard, but beautiful setting. Eventually, this site waas developed and become one of the largest flea markets in the country, and the grave remained in the parking lot. A few years ago, the flea market was torn down to make way for a megaplex theatre, and the grave is still there, but they have added bars and railings around it. A lone grave in a sea of asphalt.
emily, we've got one of those in the middle of a shopping center here, too. home depot, bed bad beyond, books a million, grave, mcdonalds, red lobster...it's like an island in the middle of the parking lot, elevated about 8' so you can tell how much this area had to be graded. i never noticed it until someone else pointed it out. everybody just drives/parks around it.
Oct 7, 06 8:26 am ·
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remember when death was celebrated as a spectator sport?
my professor of Alternative Construction Methods raised the idea last class of using human ashes in the making of adobe brick. One could have specific bricks, or walls, or their forbeareres sp?
Interesting thought.
And as far as cemetery's go, one must visit the Recoletta if one ever finds onesself in Buenos Aires.
jasoncross: I don't know for sure about brick but I feel certain this has been done; there are various kinds of objets that people make with human ashes; how about a nice glass paperweight?
I've seen various examples of this kind of thing, but it usually seems to be some kind of thing to put on your mantel, or jewelry to wear, rather than an actual building material. I suppose this is suitable for a nomadic society...and/or it makes some kind of huge statement about our materialistic society, one which I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning to do justice to.
I am intrigued by the lone graves in shopping malls and parking lots. this idea that you get your little plot of earth as real estate to be owned in perpetuity is pretty uniquely American I think. Other cultures haven't had much trouble with the idea of getting kicked out of graves after an interval to go hang out in the ossuary with everyone else. but we have developed this idea of ETERNAL REPOSE coupled with the inviolable rights of property ownership...
I don't personally think having a tiny island in the middle of a shopping mall would be very reposeful, but to each his own.
architkd; I hadn't realized that woodlawn cemetery was at the end of a train line, but it would surely make sense. the garden cemeteries were attractions in their own right during the 19th century. they predated and in part inspired public parks; they were a place the public could go with a picnic basket on a Sunday and hang out for the day & be inspired and uplifted by the art and nature and all of that. I wonder if there isn't a parallel with the history of amusement parks, which also tended to be sited at the end of trolley lines; the trolley companies would develop that property in order to get ridership on the weekends.
p.s. to liberty bell: you never saw Laurel Hill cemetery when you were in Philadelphia? it's one of the more fabulous rural garden cemeteries and I believe came right after Mount Auburn. tragically I haven't managed to see it yet myself, though I've spent some time in philadelphia (my sister lives there.)
odd that no one in this thread has mentioned pere lachaise yet. the original cemetery-as-cultural attraction. haven't been there, but MUST get there soon.
I have a fond hobby of visiting the oldest cemetary in a new (or old) city that I visit (along with going to the top of the tallest building). Habit particularly refined as going to the back corner - childrens area. Marble angels towering over the interred. Shooting monuments with forced perspective. Lots of nice marble figurative sculptures to be appreciated.
Once in portland, ore, found a grave that interested me. & took a picture. Name was similar to the family name of a friend - but spelled a bit differently. Schleuning became Schleining....... Didn't know it, but it was actually an uncle and the friend amusedly told me a fascinating story. The oldest one of fourteen kids, with the first who passed away later being the name of the last born in the chain of that generation..........
You find out alot about a citys evolution by waves of immigrant populations that might eventually leave the area but, leave their losses documented. Evergreen in East LA is a fabulous document to the who's of LA's development. Isaac Van Nuys, Isaac Lankershim, William Mulholland, and others are buried (and quite nicely at that) there.
Found a tomb (dorian or phyrgian) in Turkey with an engraved curse in the facade of sarcophagus against anyone who might decide to use a tomb again for a later interrment. Nearly all of the Gallipolli peninsula is a massive cemetary, with bodies and artifacts, like wristwatches still popping out of the soil amidst olive groves.
However, I have learned a couple things. Dates on stones for birth are not necessarily accurate. My grandfathers birth date was off by two years.
In southern China, I noticed that cemetaries are up on hills, with the dead housed in jars, where the land is not needed for agriculture. Efficiency as a cultural expression.
In the excavatory finds at Dholavira (Harappa), it was noted that
"....amongst the most curious finds is a huge brick masonry tumulus, or a circular grave built in with 10 radial lines of mud bricks almost assuming the shape of a 'spoked wheel' perhaps personifying, as Prof. Bisht says, "life, rebirth or the kalchakra" (the wheel of Time) at this ancient sepulchral site. Interestingly, all these funerary structures except one were devoid of skeletons. Bhisht explains this as perhaps being a " "symbolic gesture" of recalling the dead. The grave sites typically have an assortment of supple pots and curvaceous jars."
The images etched on these jars and funerary pottery were peacocks, dotted circles and trefoils like those on the plumes of a peacock or like a wheel with a nave, and blackbuck antelope, the etymon of all these being traced to remembrance.
Late Harappan Period large burial urn with ledged rim for holding a bowl-shaped lid. The painted panel around the shoulder of the vessel depicts flying peacocks with sun or star motifs and wavy lines that may represent water. Cemetery H period, after 1900 BC.
The etymon goes like this
marak = peacock;
sma_raka = remembrance;
ji_van-ji_vaka = cry of the peacock,
In Pali language, ji_van-ji_vaka means a bird, a sort of pheasant which utters a note sounding like ji_van ji_va (Di_gha III.201)...
The peacock on the burial pottery on the Sarasvati and Sindhu river basins is believed to be a representation of the lexemes:
"ji_van-ji_vaka", which may be interpreted as a message to the departed soul - "May he live as he goes with life..."
There is still a Jain saying/phrase in India, meaning the above bolded: ji_vanji_ven.a gacchai ji_vanji_venan cit.t.hai
A beautiful Indic thought.
That's probably why the hundred argus-eyes of remembrance on its plumes found its way in the colourless desert landscape architecture of Rajasthan; that something can die and the sands of time can shift, and still things live, burning irradiantly, while they go with life to death.
Of course, some architectures themselves are those argus-eyes, evoking remembrance just as a peacock.
I see the pillar like the axis mundi, communication/communion between the living and the dead, with the raven and the ivy/vine adding to the death and rebirth motif.
oe: > In fact, the very first permanent architecture was that of tombs. When sedentary civilization began to form, we didnt build homes of our own, we moved in as guests in the houses of the dead.
By "we" you mean Europeans in general, or all mankind?
The ancient Vedic text [The Yajurveda hymn (xxxv, 15)], says that after the burning of the body, the duty of the priest was to raise a bank or lump of earth between the village where the deceased dwelt and the funeral ground, as a rampart against death.
So in Vedic India atleast, it seems, fortifications were important and boundaries were very much respected.
In another Vedic text [The Rg-Vedic hymn (x. 18)], the setting gives a vivid description of the funeral of a warrior. It appears that the dead-body was carried to the funeral ground by one path - the path of death, and the party returned by another, the path of life.
That is still the custom today in most parts here.
nevermore: > Someone's philosophical Musing on Death:---
the single certainty that life offers each of us ?
The sureness of our eventual death.
and The Only certain uncertainty ? :-
The time when that death shall come to call us.
That's a musing from Tibetan Buddhism.
The same was later said by the French sociologist Morin,
"The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life."
I suppose this is on a similar line to leopold's painting of the pillar. The bamboo pole.
"Resembling at first glance a natural bamboo grove, this monument, part of Arakawa's plans for the Site of Reversible Destiny right from the time of its conception, serves as a gateway to the overall Site. The Gate's terrain is engraved with the seven Chinese characters making up the Site's Japanese name (yo, ro, ten, mei, han, ten, chi), and is dotted with copperwork sculptures of various animals, including birds, a cat, a rabbit, and a snake. The Gate embodies the artist's idea of rejecting all assumed givens by enclosing nature (the bamboo, the animals, and so on) within human-devised material, in this case copper plate. In Japanese tradition, the idea of a gate is readily associated with torii, the gate-like structures in front of Shinto shrines. The earliest torii, however, were just two bamboo poles. By eliminating all extraneous decorative devices incorporated since then into present-day gate forms, the Gate of Non-Dying harks back to those original, primitive entrance-markers."
"The modernists wanted to strip the world of mystery and emotion. No wonder they excelled at the architecture of death, says JG Ballard.
All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end."
nice article sotthi - thanks. doesn't necessarily make an argument that you can either agree with or not - more of a set of musings - but ballard always has a different take on things if nothing else. full text here
orhan: there is some discussion/pictures of the Chipperfield project for San Michele in the book "Monument Builders" by Edwin Heathcote, it's part of the "..Builders" series from Academy Editions.
some good discussion of modernism/monuments - the superbly cranky Adolf Loos felt that only the monument can be both art and architecture because it is freed from the burden of function. he designed humself a tombstone but it wasn't until 1956 that it was built on his behalf:
"By "we" you mean Europeans in general, or all mankind?"
Well we werent really anyone at the time, this was when the first seeds of civilization were forming in the neolithic, the first small agricultural settlements around the black sea. I suppose that puts it at the head of the Indo-european civilization, I dont know if the same goes for proto-chinese or proto-indian civilization or if its even clear how much cultural exchange existed back then...
"I too would like to hear more about your thesis and "literal communication between the living and the dead", this is a major issue in my thinking about the subject."
I dont have my stuff with me, the thing was staggeringly long and difficult to summarize. I'll do my best though.
I found while working on this thing, that making a cemetery wasnt about understanding death, but about understanding life. You cant understand what death is unless you understand what the difference is, what conscious existence really consists of. This had been a question I had been pursuing my whole life, and to summarize everything Ive read and thought and felt in the process is impossible. I can only say that at a certain point, it became clear, terrifyingly clear, that the veil is thinner than we presume. The world is not dualistic. There is no 'outside'. Emotion, consciousness, are not the exclusive possessions of matter lucky enough to be bound up in brains and sense organs. They are not invented out of thin air, they are not derived, but are entirely inherent to everything that exists, every potentiality of being in the universe. They are in fact the material of which it is formed. The topology may not be flat, but it is indivisible.
In simplest terms, a cemetery aught to be a common ground, an intersection and interface between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Its a space of overlap, a heterotopia, in which the two are enabled to physically and emotionally commune with one another. After endless experimentation, I found that to construct such a place in a manner that is truly genuine, I had to find some mutual plane on which the two could intersect. I had to abandon my grip on symbols and allegory, as these were comforts of the living only. I had to relax my understanding of time, my preconceptions about what is material and what is not, what is here and what is there, what is inside and what is outside. My medium was not wood and stone, not space, not at least in the static conception that is so easy to fall upon. My medium was emotion and consciousness itself, of which space and time are themselves derivative.
When a person dies, it is very easy, given our civilized prejudices to assume all communication becomes impossible. Why should this be so? Because we cannot see them walking around? Because they cannot use thier mouths to speak to us? If you write a note to your wife, does she presume there is no communication simply because she cannot see you at the moment of reading it? We forget that the gestures we share back and forth are not material or instantaneous at all, but are little signals we send each other through the metaphysical realm. Words said to you by your father when you were 10 years old on a beach may not resound in your mind until 20 years later. A flower from an old boyfriend may be found pressed in a book even after nearly all memory is forgotten. Life isnt made of blood and electrical impulses, but of those emotional gestures themselves. Life is an emotion pretending to be a house, pretending to be a flower, a beach, a family, a forest. An hour, a day, a decade, may be flattened into a single feeling, a single word. All the sound and light in the world, just the shimmering of leaves, a cascade of images rustling in the pulsing invisible gusts, washing like waves upon the shore.
Slowly, with practice, I could think and design directly on those terms. When a person goes to the island where they shared with friends and family a loved one’s funeral, when they look upon the sea in which that loved one is interred, repeat the procession, its smells and its memories; when thier hands move upon the binding of an old photo album and thier mind delves into the memories bound in its images, they are no longer separated from thier loved one by the years that have passed, but literally are placed in tactile contact with those events.
I found I could use the funeral process to encode a persons memory in space. As family gathers to recall all the best memories, funny stories, thier deepest feelings and secrets, the memories themselves become bound to the space of thier telling. When your brother tells you a story about fishing with your father, those transmitted images become sewn within the light and smells of the room in which you heard the story. Those spaces become literally linked in time and space through the fabric of your mind. I found I could use clear spatial, emotional signals to mentally codify memories recalled in group from memories recalled quietly and alone. I could bind memories recalled while eating or taking a shower or walking along a beach clearly to a unique configuration of light, temperature, sounds and views. Those effects of space could then be linked to eachother or repeated elsewhere in the project to as a device for summoning and linking different kinds of memories to eachother and the space of the cemetery itself.
Anyway, obviously there was much more to it, but that was the principal of the device. Just the way our minds link all the fragments of words and images that weve perceived to eachother, creating the quirky little entanglement of emotions that we are, I had hoped to link and entangle the memories of a loved one lost, everything that matters about a person, to the space of the site. The memories of whole communities, the memory of 10,000 families, tied among the stone and wood and sea-spray.
Ok, but why do I need an architect (or landscape architect, or...) to give me a huge expensive place for all those things to happen? aren't they already happening on their own, in the places where we already live our lives?
and couldn't a burial place be beautiful, and meaningful, without having to carry ALL the burden of memorializing human life? it's just one stop along the way, and not as permanent as we would like to think (as discussed above.)
as much as I think about these issues, collect trivia about them, and yes, even crack jokes about them, I think I am still aware that it is just colossal designers' arrogance to think you can REALLY make the fact of death somehow OK or even do very much to bring about 'healing'.
that's why I think I might want to open my thesis, not with Walt Whitman talking about grass being the beautiful uncut hair of graves, and not with Philip Larkin talking about a proper place to grow wise in, but with the Millay poem that begins: "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground."
I had to run out to Pomona today on an unrelated errand, so stopped by Rose Hills on the way back to do my cemetery geek thing for a bit. got some nice pictures of the Fay Jones Skyrose chapel, which someone had left open, wandered around watching people sitting on the grass around the markers, setting up their pinwheels and little fences (random thought: what is it with the pinwheels? must figure out...), chinese families burning incense & bowing. one guy, by himself, rushing over with his incense as though he had a LOT of errands to get through today and he needed to take care of this one in a hurry.
then, wandered down a path that I hadn't been on before (Rose Hills is the largest single-site cemetery in the world and I've only been there once before I think) which turned out to be lined with topiaries of baby animals, found myself in some kind of infant's area.
tried to get my camera out. found I just couldn't do it.
Cemeteries
just wondering if any archinecters share my obsession.
of course, my interest originates from the landscape side, but architects and planners ought to find them intriguing too.
and yet, a curiously neglected subject in the design world (with some notable exceptions.) could it have anything to do with a little cultural discomfort with, oh say maybe, mortality?
nitpicker, My friend had done a thesis in college on crematoriums.
Its a very interesting, diverse and yes ur right ,Its quite an unexplored topic .
If you study history, Death (burial,cremation ) etc has been iconised in the past more than now.
One of the most celebrated and most recognisable set of monuments in the world is actually a royal cemetary ( The Giza Pyramids ) .A small fact which escapes most at the first thought of it.
If you encompass "death" as dealt with in all cultures throughout ages, I would say that there is no "cultural" discomfort as you mentioned, rather human psychological discomfort.
of course but then culture is something very human.
Just a small bit of trivia : Most of the adherents of the Zoroastrian religion neither cremate nor bury , they dispose of the dead to birds of prey.
Its followed sometimes by tibetan buddhists too.
In Bombay, The structure where the zoroastrian last rites are commited is called the "Tower of Silence".
It may sound cruel but their philosophy is something like
1) thats like the final act of charity , a human can get done
2) none of the 5 elements-earth ,water,air,fire or ether should be contaminated directly with death...
There's quite an eco-friendly angle to that ancient way of thinking.
My thesis was a cemetery. Ive studied practically every death rite from neanderthals to cryogenics. Traditional burial is actually a bit of a latecomer in the grand scheme of things. Cremation is far more prevalent historically. As is floor burial in homes and even cannibalism if Im not mistaken. Some fun ones are the hanging coffins of western china, lantern boats in coastal japan, the pyres of varanasi. In precolonial Hawaii, it was believed that the potency of ones soul was carried in thier bones, and so to capture and possess the bones of one's enemies was to capture thier soul's energy. While kings could afford year round armed guards at thier tombs, the general population was forced to hide thier burials, and created elaborate code-songs to pass down the secret locations of thier ancestors burials to only the most trusted family members. When anthropologists studied the burial of neanderthals in caves, they discovered not only were the bodies laid out in patterns, but immense amounts of pollen and seed matter mixed with the soil around the bodies. The bodies had either laid upon or completely covered in dense beds of flowers. In fact, the very first permanent architecture was that of tombs. When sedentary civilization began to form, we didnt build homes of our own, we moved in as guests in the houses of the dead.
Ha I could go on all night...
But yes. I would have to agree there is a general social aversion to death in modern society (real death that is, I wrote a whole section our subconscious redirection toward media-sensationalized death in the news, TV, horror films, etc.), and yes it is a rather recent development. Weve gotten so its barely socially acceptable to even use the word, its always, in a quieted and almost shameful tone, "passed away" or "no longer with us". Its no longer treated as a natural function, but as some kind of shameful disease. With religion quickly dissipating as a reliable authority on mortality, the growing centrality of materialism in our culture, our ability to understand and accept something as existentially confounding as death has fallen too. And its a terribly insidious failure. Our elders are hidden away in nursing homes, pumped full of pills and tubes and wires and machines and plastic coated devices of every sort, right till the dying breath, all surrounded in the antiseptic polish of stainless steel and white-washed walls, denied not only an honorable natural death, but the nobility of ones final wisdom-bearing years and decades, just so we can avoid the 'unpleasantness' of being reminded of our mortal nature. Its truly despicable.
Worse than that perhaps, the general denial of death leaves us emotionally unequipped to deal with death when it inevitably comes. Beyond hurried wake services death becomes an almost entirely individual burden to bear. Our customs are so out of date, so neglected, we no longer have any macro-social mechanism for dealing with it all. How can a cemetery be practical when families are spread all over the country and world? Our crematory operators where lab-coats for chris'sake. The corporate funeral home replaced the custom of being laid out in the family home, whole communities coming to living rooms to pay respects.
It even erodes our moral character. With the mortal strand severed, in what framework are we to understand consequences beyond our own lifetimes? Without a clear understanding of our ancestors, how may we project our own impact on the generations ahead?
Anyway, thats just my rant. Actually 90% of my thesis dealt more with the metaphysical problem of creating a place of literal communion between living and dead. From a temporal, spatial, semantic standpoint its a total brainfuck.
I dont think that should be called shameful, i think its more to do with politeness...which ur right again ..is to provide a buffer for something unpleasant.
The tibetan buddhists have a phrase (which I think is very beautiful )when they refer to someone dead , they say :-
"he/she has gone beyond sorrow."
anyways, oe those were Fantastic thoughts of yours. Could you share some more of your thesis ?
interesting cemetery/death-related architecture (other than memorials)?:
miralles' cemetery
rossi's modena cemetery
peter behrens' hagen crematorium
scarpa's brion cemetery
various sarcophagi of michelangelo
oe, wonderful post. I enjoyed raeding it and agree with pretty much all you've said. I do think nevermore is right that euphemisms are used out of politeness toward the person you're talking too. I once worked with a African man - it was years ago but I think he was from Zimbabwe? - who was appalled when I told him I wanted to be cremated but didn't care hat happened to the ashes. He had very strongly cultural opinions regarding death and the treatment of the body and was upset that I was so cavalier about it. Just a cultural disconnect, I should have been more sensitive to his opinion.
I did a semester abroad in Vienna and spent a LOT of time in the big cemetery there, the Zentralfriedhof, where Beethoven and other famous people are buried and the architecture of the tombs/chapels is amazingly diverse. Also went out to the burbs to see Egon Schiele's grave. Vienna is a good "death city".
Of course Plecnik's Zale Cemetery in Llubljana was one of the big high points of my time abroad: his work there is mouth-droppingly bizarre and wonderful.
Philly's historic cemeteries are also supposedly wonderful though I never spent any time in them. I think Furness has a big tomb for himself there?
A friend and I in school talked about designing a building with a cornerstone containing a chamber for our ashes to be deposited in after we died. Or more perversly, in a doorknob. A cool idea, but these days I'm more of a "scatter to the winds" attidute.
add to Steven's list:
Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, Woodland Cemetery
I grew up on a farm with a cemetary on it. We were the caretakers of it. All the graves were 1860-1920 or so, hardly anyone came by to visit, but usually someone did on Memorial Day. There is an old foundation for a church too, and we had old photos of it. Lutheran of course. I planted flowers up there and went there to muse when worldly things got me down. Might be buried there myself. The first burial in over 100 years.
cemetary, cemetery. I suppose I've always misspelled that. Learned something new.
Someone's philosophical Musing on Death:---
the single certainty that life offers each of us ?
The sureness of our eventual death.
and The Only certain uncertainty ? :-
The time when that death shall come to call us.
"the general denial of death leaves us emotionally unequipped to deal with death when it inevitably comes. "
so we were 'then' equipped and 'now' not? to pile upon the mountain of 'thens vs nows' . in any case, all equipment is for the purpose of avoiding death. this is exactly what drove humans to make tools/equipments in the first place. those two colours don't mix in a meaning. emotionally equiped for death...:)
marketable.
I do recognize the euphemisms as conventions of politeness, I use them myself. Of course there is sadness involved, if nothing else just in knowing it will be a long time, if ever, that we will see them again. Its not the words so much that bother me but the tone. If a friend was leaving to join thier family and take a fantastic job in a foreign country and you may never see them again, would you speak about it with such a quieted voice?
Anyway, Im sure I could dig up some images for you guys. I actually spent 70% of my time working on this giant funeral home and crematorium on an islet adjacent to the site. The idea was that it was a small hotel for funerals, 12 rooms and a guest house, that several families at a time could come for 3 days or a week to remember someone in a beautiful place. It had a large hearth space for receptions, dining halls, wake halls and a mortuary. Right facing it and reaching out into the water was a large crematory, a library for photo albums and a dock built for a specially designed funerary catamaran for the spreading of ashes at sea. Somehow it became really absurdly enormous. I needed the scale for psychological effect, and it just got taller and taller until it was practically comic. I had this idea that I could take the typology of a ghost town, turn it inside-out and occupy the dead space. I spent all this time working with symbology, conscripting the spatial structure of afterlife myths into real space, these really silly post-modern ideas about form, but quickly learned the most potent emotional communicators were just brute environmental effects; light, temperature, tactility, a fog, the roar of the ocean or the view of the sunrise. The cemetery itself was on an abandoned WWII battery in Kittery Maine called Fort Foster, looking out across the Piscatiqua and the Isle of Shoals. I occupied the old fortifications and sighting towers for crypts, large community urns, an outdoor chapel, just clustering on these fortified knolls between walkpaths through the wetlands. The thing was really bonkers actually...
Yama yama boring without images...
Cellar, I am probably romanticising a bit, but there did used to be a much more comfortable relationship with death. I would argue it was more honest, and more graceful than is today's, but perhaps I myself am overly comfortable.
There is a great deal of difference between making tools to improve one's life, and making tools to simply to avoid death.
in the 19th c it wasn't uncommon for some to dress up, pose, and take portraits of their dead kin.
nobody has actually died since the internet came online.
in fact, i'm still alive
I also love cemetaries, and my favorite of all would have to be Greenwood Cemetary, here in Brooklyn. Greenwood is expansive, and has dozens of fine examples of Victorian tombs, and many Neo-Egyptian graves as well. It is impressive not only for it's size and beauty, but also for the number of famous New Yorker's taking their final nap their. Louis C Tiffany and 'Boss' Tweed have two of my favorite graves. The chapels and mausoleums come in many different styles, so you can see quite a few different examples of Victorian death culture all in one day. On top of all this, Greenwood has got to be one of the most peaceful, well kept spaces in all of NYC. I highly reccomend a visit, or a tour if the timing is right.
I'm doing a cemetery for my thesis, as is one of my classmates. So, maybe they are becoming more popular topics of conversation.
wow, I wish I had time to respond in detail to all the posts here. YES, I have found others who share my obsession!
I grew up about half a mile from Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts. Used to ride my bike there and wander around looking at all the monuments. I am sure it was an early influence in many ways. I wasn't exactly a Goth kid or obsessed with death (actually I pre-date the Goth thing by a bit, ahem); I was obssessed with history; trying to understand these bygone people is like peering through the wrong end of a telescope, they seem further away than they really are.
oe, I too would like to hear more about your thesis and "literal communication between the living and the dead", this is a major issue in my thinking about the subject.
liminality between the world of the living and the dead, the above ground and below ground - seems to me this is a major part of the power of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
and interesting, in this connection, to think about the 9/11 families who got up in arms protesting about the Arad memorial design - that it was "underground", dark, hidden, limited, shameful, and they repeat over and over again that they want the memorial to be in the "light of day." of course, people said the same damn things about maya lin's work, that it was dark and shameful and depressing, until it was built and became so beloved.
however, this is also conflating memorials and cemeteries, which overlap but are not the same thing or dealing with the same sets of issues.
interesting that the first response I got was a post about the zoroastrians' towers of silence. just a couple weeks ago I read an AP story about how there is a serious issue with the towers of silence...not enough vultures. No, really. The vultures are endangered, various things like pesticide posioning have been doing them in, and there are not enough vultures around to do the job. You can imagine the results. there was a woman who caused a scandal by scaling the towers of silence to take photos and do an expose on the conditions up there. pretty horrifying stuff.
"in the 19th c it wasn't uncommon for some to dress up, pose, and take portraits of their dead kin."
i watched the others too. nicole looked a pale eylelid.
in my culture, family is thrown one atop the other . the son on his dad. the gene pool literally pooling back together. a landscraper tower of bodies that generated each other, and degenrates into each other.
the same flat rectangle of earth pierced by a familial axis of deaths.
is the others a movie? maybe i should see it.
oh cummon, dont be so defensive
?
yeah it's a movie..i didn't like it...
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
--Philip Larkin, "Church Going"
sometimes I find one must go straight to poetry in order to think about death...
anyway, the full poem, though I didn't post it here, is worth reading. it's about stopping into an old church and wondering what will become of it when belief totally fades away, -that people will still have some kind of dim awareness of what it represents about the continuity of life and death.
**
as for whether we once had a more "comfortable" relationship with death, I wouldn't put it quite that way...I don't think the human relationship with death has ever been comfortable, and why on earth should it? There have been different sets of rituals in the past (though it's a mistake to think, at least in American history, that there has been some sort of stable tradition) and now our relationship with death rituals has gone fairly screwy. See Mitford's "American Way of Death", still required reading on the subject despite some biases and unnecessary snideness. we're pretty much left with an orgy of conspicuous consumption (which of course is a disaster from a ecological point of view) and some unsustainable land-use practices to boot.
though I too love cemeteries as green open space, at least the good ones. and the older historical ones, like mount auburn, have developed a certain level of programming to make themselves relevant to more than the history buffs; mount auburn is a big favorite with birdwatchers for one thing, and they've done quite a bit to encourage that.
of course the british, who have much much older churchyards to deal with, have done quite a bit more to rethink their churchyards as wildlife sanctuaries. it filled me with great delight to read the observations of the British Lichen Society about the importance of churchyards as lichen habitat - did you realize that different lichens like to live on different parts of gravestones? google "living churchyards" for more fun with churchyards as habitat.
which brings it all back to the Larkin poem and wondering what use these grounds wind up being as time goes by; how can we use them to maintain our connection to the past and also as an amenity for the present?
I too did my thesis on a cemetery. Infact, I did it only because our thesis theme was to do something along a highway. I happened to despised highways after learning its the history. So in order to satisfy the requirements of a highway, I understood the subways and trains as an inner highway to the city.
Furthermore, to make a long story short, I chose the #4 four line in New York Ciry endingthe Bronx at Woodlawn Cemetery. I found it very interesting that a train track would end at the begining of a cemetery. So after my research. I began to understand the cemetery as an inner edge to the city where as the board walk is an outer edge.
Most communities here in the US tend to not understand the cemetery, and cast it aside as a seperate organism, but infact it should be the opposite. growing up in the Caribbean showed another perspective on the relationship of the cemetery to the community. It aslo geve me atremendous drive to explore a world that most of us haven't a clue about.
I think I ike cemeteries most because of their history and the stories that come with them. Also, they are very spiritual environmentsand we can learn alot from them
One of the oddest cemeteries I know consists of only one grave. When the woman was orginally interred, her grave was on a fairly bucolic knoll overlooking the Raritan River, in mid Jersey. A pretty standard, but beautiful setting. Eventually, this site waas developed and become one of the largest flea markets in the country, and the grave remained in the parking lot. A few years ago, the flea market was torn down to make way for a megaplex theatre, and the grave is still there, but they have added bars and railings around it. A lone grave in a sea of asphalt.
nitpicker, nitpicking:
i'd say its thinking about thinking about death ("And that much never can be obsolete"). the obsolete = dead physical matter ...ground, house, air.
"I think I like cemeteries..."
somewhere, theres the eventuality of a worm waiting for me
emily, we've got one of those in the middle of a shopping center here, too. home depot, bed bad beyond, books a million, grave, mcdonalds, red lobster...it's like an island in the middle of the parking lot, elevated about 8' so you can tell how much this area had to be graded. i never noticed it until someone else pointed it out. everybody just drives/parks around it.
remember when death was celebrated as a spectator sport?
http://www.museumpeace.com/01/0058.htm
it's like where Rossi got his best cemetery ideas.
hey, welcome back! haven't seen you in a while.
my professor of Alternative Construction Methods raised the idea last class of using human ashes in the making of adobe brick. One could have specific bricks, or walls, or their forbeareres sp?
Interesting thought.
And as far as cemetery's go, one must visit the Recoletta if one ever finds onesself in Buenos Aires.
jasoncross: I don't know for sure about brick but I feel certain this has been done; there are various kinds of objets that people make with human ashes; how about a nice glass paperweight?
http://www.soulbursts.com/
or some "bone" china?
http://www.antiquesatoz.com/artatoz/krafft/funerary.htm
and of course tons of ceramic artists do this too.
oh wait, how about a DIAMOND?
http://www.lifegem.com/
I've seen various examples of this kind of thing, but it usually seems to be some kind of thing to put on your mantel, or jewelry to wear, rather than an actual building material. I suppose this is suitable for a nomadic society...and/or it makes some kind of huge statement about our materialistic society, one which I haven't had enough coffee yet this morning to do justice to.
I am intrigued by the lone graves in shopping malls and parking lots. this idea that you get your little plot of earth as real estate to be owned in perpetuity is pretty uniquely American I think. Other cultures haven't had much trouble with the idea of getting kicked out of graves after an interval to go hang out in the ossuary with everyone else. but we have developed this idea of ETERNAL REPOSE coupled with the inviolable rights of property ownership...
I don't personally think having a tiny island in the middle of a shopping mall would be very reposeful, but to each his own.
architkd; I hadn't realized that woodlawn cemetery was at the end of a train line, but it would surely make sense. the garden cemeteries were attractions in their own right during the 19th century. they predated and in part inspired public parks; they were a place the public could go with a picnic basket on a Sunday and hang out for the day & be inspired and uplifted by the art and nature and all of that. I wonder if there isn't a parallel with the history of amusement parks, which also tended to be sited at the end of trolley lines; the trolley companies would develop that property in order to get ridership on the weekends.
p.s. to liberty bell: you never saw Laurel Hill cemetery when you were in Philadelphia? it's one of the more fabulous rural garden cemeteries and I believe came right after Mount Auburn. tragically I haven't managed to see it yet myself, though I've spent some time in philadelphia (my sister lives there.)
odd that no one in this thread has mentioned pere lachaise yet. the original cemetery-as-cultural attraction. haven't been there, but MUST get there soon.
ah, the necropolis.
I have a fond hobby of visiting the oldest cemetary in a new (or old) city that I visit (along with going to the top of the tallest building). Habit particularly refined as going to the back corner - childrens area. Marble angels towering over the interred. Shooting monuments with forced perspective. Lots of nice marble figurative sculptures to be appreciated.
Once in portland, ore, found a grave that interested me. & took a picture. Name was similar to the family name of a friend - but spelled a bit differently. Schleuning became Schleining....... Didn't know it, but it was actually an uncle and the friend amusedly told me a fascinating story. The oldest one of fourteen kids, with the first who passed away later being the name of the last born in the chain of that generation..........
You find out alot about a citys evolution by waves of immigrant populations that might eventually leave the area but, leave their losses documented. Evergreen in East LA is a fabulous document to the who's of LA's development. Isaac Van Nuys, Isaac Lankershim, William Mulholland, and others are buried (and quite nicely at that) there.
Found a tomb (dorian or phyrgian) in Turkey with an engraved curse in the facade of sarcophagus against anyone who might decide to use a tomb again for a later interrment. Nearly all of the Gallipolli peninsula is a massive cemetary, with bodies and artifacts, like wristwatches still popping out of the soil amidst olive groves.
However, I have learned a couple things. Dates on stones for birth are not necessarily accurate. My grandfathers birth date was off by two years.
In southern China, I noticed that cemetaries are up on hills, with the dead housed in jars, where the land is not needed for agriculture. Efficiency as a cultural expression.
Fabulously interesting places.
In the excavatory finds at Dholavira (Harappa), it was noted that
"....amongst the most curious finds is a huge brick masonry tumulus, or a circular grave built in with 10 radial lines of mud bricks almost assuming the shape of a 'spoked wheel' perhaps personifying, as Prof. Bisht says, "life, rebirth or the kalchakra" (the wheel of Time) at this ancient sepulchral site. Interestingly, all these funerary structures except one were devoid of skeletons. Bhisht explains this as perhaps being a " "symbolic gesture" of recalling the dead. The grave sites typically have an assortment of supple pots and curvaceous jars."
The images etched on these jars and funerary pottery were peacocks, dotted circles and trefoils like those on the plumes of a peacock or like a wheel with a nave, and blackbuck antelope, the etymon of all these being traced to remembrance.
Late Harappan Period large burial urn with ledged rim for holding a bowl-shaped lid. The painted panel around the shoulder of the vessel depicts flying peacocks with sun or star motifs and wavy lines that may represent water. Cemetery H period, after 1900 BC.
The etymon goes like this
marak = peacock;
sma_raka = remembrance;
ji_van-ji_vaka = cry of the peacock,
In Pali language, ji_van-ji_vaka means a bird, a sort of pheasant which utters a note sounding like ji_van ji_va (Di_gha III.201)...
The peacock on the burial pottery on the Sarasvati and Sindhu river basins is believed to be a representation of the lexemes:
"ji_van-ji_vaka", which may be interpreted as a message to the departed soul - "May he live as he goes with life..."
There is still a Jain saying/phrase in India, meaning the above bolded: ji_vanji_ven.a gacchai ji_vanji_venan cit.t.hai
A beautiful Indic thought.
That's probably why the hundred argus-eyes of remembrance on its plumes found its way in the colourless desert landscape architecture of Rajasthan; that something can die and the sands of time can shift, and still things live, burning irradiantly, while they go with life to death.
Of course, some architectures themselves are those argus-eyes, evoking remembrance just as a peacock.
Death and Architecture, a painting by Leopold, 1989.
http://home.earthlink.net/~samleopold/death_and_architecture.htm
I see the pillar like the axis mundi, communication/communion between the living and the dead, with the raven and the ivy/vine adding to the death and rebirth motif.
oe: > In fact, the very first permanent architecture was that of tombs. When sedentary civilization began to form, we didnt build homes of our own, we moved in as guests in the houses of the dead.
By "we" you mean Europeans in general, or all mankind?
The ancient Vedic text [The Yajurveda hymn (xxxv, 15)], says that after the burning of the body, the duty of the priest was to raise a bank or lump of earth between the village where the deceased dwelt and the funeral ground, as a rampart against death.
So in Vedic India atleast, it seems, fortifications were important and boundaries were very much respected.
In another Vedic text [The Rg-Vedic hymn (x. 18)], the setting gives a vivid description of the funeral of a warrior. It appears that the dead-body was carried to the funeral ground by one path - the path of death, and the party returned by another, the path of life.
That is still the custom today in most parts here.
nevermore: > Someone's philosophical Musing on Death:---
the single certainty that life offers each of us ?
The sureness of our eventual death.
and The Only certain uncertainty ? :-
The time when that death shall come to call us.
That's a musing from Tibetan Buddhism.
The same was later said by the French sociologist Morin,
"The certainty of death and the uncertainty of the hour of death is a source of grief throughout our life."
I suppose this is on a similar line to leopold's painting of the pillar. The bamboo pole.
"Resembling at first glance a natural bamboo grove, this monument, part of Arakawa's plans for the Site of Reversible Destiny right from the time of its conception, serves as a gateway to the overall Site. The Gate's terrain is engraved with the seven Chinese characters making up the Site's Japanese name (yo, ro, ten, mei, han, ten, chi), and is dotted with copperwork sculptures of various animals, including birds, a cat, a rabbit, and a snake. The Gate embodies the artist's idea of rejecting all assumed givens by enclosing nature (the bamboo, the animals, and so on) within human-devised material, in this case copper plate. In Japanese tradition, the idea of a gate is readily associated with torii, the gate-like structures in front of Shinto shrines. The earliest torii, however, were just two bamboo poles. By eliminating all extraneous decorative devices incorporated since then into present-day gate forms, the Gate of Non-Dying harks back to those original, primitive entrance-markers."
Site of Reversible Destiny:
http://www.yoro-park.com/e/rev/map002_en.html#anchor002
http://www.tropolism.com/2006/01/architecture_that_defies_death.php
"The modernists wanted to strip the world of mystery and emotion. No wonder they excelled at the architecture of death, says JG Ballard.
All of us have our dreams to reassure us. Architecture is a stage set where we need to be at ease in order to perform. Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves. Modernism lacked mystery and emotion, was a little too frank about the limits of human nature and never prepared us for our eventual end."
http://www.karljones.com/index.php/2006/03/21/jg-ballard-on-modernist-architecture/
nice article sotthi - thanks. doesn't necessarily make an argument that you can either agree with or not - more of a set of musings - but ballard always has a different take on things if nothing else. full text here
are there any more pictures of the mortuary island of san michele in the venice lagoon? nice article. thanks.
here is a david chipperfield architects project for the island.
it boils down this way...
there are two kinds of women...
the ones who will drink tequila out of the bottle and walk around the cemetary barebreasted and the ones who won't...
I visited Frank Loyd Wrights Grave a few years ago. It is located at the Church Yard just across the Road From Telisan East.
orhan: there is some discussion/pictures of the Chipperfield project for San Michele in the book "Monument Builders" by Edwin Heathcote, it's part of the "..Builders" series from Academy Editions.
some good discussion of modernism/monuments - the superbly cranky Adolf Loos felt that only the monument can be both art and architecture because it is freed from the burden of function. he designed humself a tombstone but it wasn't until 1956 that it was built on his behalf:
http://www.euxus.de/wien-ehrengalerie.html
thanks nitpicker, i'll look it up.
mies @ graceland cemetery in chicago.
ottoman royal tombs in bursa, turkey. scroll down to tombs. also, this is a great picture gallery site for turkish architecture.
link
Well we werent really anyone at the time, this was when the first seeds of civilization were forming in the neolithic, the first small agricultural settlements around the black sea. I suppose that puts it at the head of the Indo-european civilization, I dont know if the same goes for proto-chinese or proto-indian civilization or if its even clear how much cultural exchange existed back then...
"I too would like to hear more about your thesis and "literal communication between the living and the dead", this is a major issue in my thinking about the subject."
I dont have my stuff with me, the thing was staggeringly long and difficult to summarize. I'll do my best though.
I found while working on this thing, that making a cemetery wasnt about understanding death, but about understanding life. You cant understand what death is unless you understand what the difference is, what conscious existence really consists of. This had been a question I had been pursuing my whole life, and to summarize everything Ive read and thought and felt in the process is impossible. I can only say that at a certain point, it became clear, terrifyingly clear, that the veil is thinner than we presume. The world is not dualistic. There is no 'outside'. Emotion, consciousness, are not the exclusive possessions of matter lucky enough to be bound up in brains and sense organs. They are not invented out of thin air, they are not derived, but are entirely inherent to everything that exists, every potentiality of being in the universe. They are in fact the material of which it is formed. The topology may not be flat, but it is indivisible.
In simplest terms, a cemetery aught to be a common ground, an intersection and interface between the realm of the living and the realm of the dead. Its a space of overlap, a heterotopia, in which the two are enabled to physically and emotionally commune with one another. After endless experimentation, I found that to construct such a place in a manner that is truly genuine, I had to find some mutual plane on which the two could intersect. I had to abandon my grip on symbols and allegory, as these were comforts of the living only. I had to relax my understanding of time, my preconceptions about what is material and what is not, what is here and what is there, what is inside and what is outside. My medium was not wood and stone, not space, not at least in the static conception that is so easy to fall upon. My medium was emotion and consciousness itself, of which space and time are themselves derivative.
When a person dies, it is very easy, given our civilized prejudices to assume all communication becomes impossible. Why should this be so? Because we cannot see them walking around? Because they cannot use thier mouths to speak to us? If you write a note to your wife, does she presume there is no communication simply because she cannot see you at the moment of reading it? We forget that the gestures we share back and forth are not material or instantaneous at all, but are little signals we send each other through the metaphysical realm. Words said to you by your father when you were 10 years old on a beach may not resound in your mind until 20 years later. A flower from an old boyfriend may be found pressed in a book even after nearly all memory is forgotten. Life isnt made of blood and electrical impulses, but of those emotional gestures themselves. Life is an emotion pretending to be a house, pretending to be a flower, a beach, a family, a forest. An hour, a day, a decade, may be flattened into a single feeling, a single word. All the sound and light in the world, just the shimmering of leaves, a cascade of images rustling in the pulsing invisible gusts, washing like waves upon the shore.
Slowly, with practice, I could think and design directly on those terms. When a person goes to the island where they shared with friends and family a loved one’s funeral, when they look upon the sea in which that loved one is interred, repeat the procession, its smells and its memories; when thier hands move upon the binding of an old photo album and thier mind delves into the memories bound in its images, they are no longer separated from thier loved one by the years that have passed, but literally are placed in tactile contact with those events.
I found I could use the funeral process to encode a persons memory in space. As family gathers to recall all the best memories, funny stories, thier deepest feelings and secrets, the memories themselves become bound to the space of thier telling. When your brother tells you a story about fishing with your father, those transmitted images become sewn within the light and smells of the room in which you heard the story. Those spaces become literally linked in time and space through the fabric of your mind. I found I could use clear spatial, emotional signals to mentally codify memories recalled in group from memories recalled quietly and alone. I could bind memories recalled while eating or taking a shower or walking along a beach clearly to a unique configuration of light, temperature, sounds and views. Those effects of space could then be linked to eachother or repeated elsewhere in the project to as a device for summoning and linking different kinds of memories to eachother and the space of the cemetery itself.
Anyway, obviously there was much more to it, but that was the principal of the device. Just the way our minds link all the fragments of words and images that weve perceived to eachother, creating the quirky little entanglement of emotions that we are, I had hoped to link and entangle the memories of a loved one lost, everything that matters about a person, to the space of the site. The memories of whole communities, the memory of 10,000 families, tied among the stone and wood and sea-spray.
tomb of ze unknown vado...
oe, I guess my response to the above is:
Ok, but why do I need an architect (or landscape architect, or...) to give me a huge expensive place for all those things to happen? aren't they already happening on their own, in the places where we already live our lives?
and couldn't a burial place be beautiful, and meaningful, without having to carry ALL the burden of memorializing human life? it's just one stop along the way, and not as permanent as we would like to think (as discussed above.)
as much as I think about these issues, collect trivia about them, and yes, even crack jokes about them, I think I am still aware that it is just colossal designers' arrogance to think you can REALLY make the fact of death somehow OK or even do very much to bring about 'healing'.
that's why I think I might want to open my thesis, not with Walt Whitman talking about grass being the beautiful uncut hair of graves, and not with Philip Larkin talking about a proper place to grow wise in, but with the Millay poem that begins: "I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground."
I had to run out to Pomona today on an unrelated errand, so stopped by Rose Hills on the way back to do my cemetery geek thing for a bit. got some nice pictures of the Fay Jones Skyrose chapel, which someone had left open, wandered around watching people sitting on the grass around the markers, setting up their pinwheels and little fences (random thought: what is it with the pinwheels? must figure out...), chinese families burning incense & bowing. one guy, by himself, rushing over with his incense as though he had a LOT of errands to get through today and he needed to take care of this one in a hurry.
then, wandered down a path that I hadn't been on before (Rose Hills is the largest single-site cemetery in the world and I've only been there once before I think) which turned out to be lined with topiaries of baby animals, found myself in some kind of infant's area.
tried to get my camera out. found I just couldn't do it.
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