Given rapidly depleting cemetery space in cities, increasing urban populations, and the acute environmental toll of both burial and cremation, alternative funerary practices are inevitable, yet currently unresolved. Our cities require new mortuary options which respond to the constraints of ecology, time, and limited burial space.

Constellation Park is a suspended public memorial, harnessing science while respecting spirituality.  The system transforms our biomass into an elegant constellation of light, illuminating new civic space amidst underutilized existing urban infrastructures.

A network of memorial shrines aggregate over time creating a cyclical infrastructure of energy and remembrance. In this scenario, grafting onto the underbelly of the Manhattan Bridge, 5,400 lives will be memorialized each year – approximately 10% of all annual deaths in NYC.

Triangulated tensile steel cables support convex memorial vessels which cradle the corpse throughout its biological metamorphosis. Public pathways and clearings knit this new multilevel territory into the life of the city. Remembrance is materialized through temporal "mourning lights," whose aggregate glow generates a perpetual landscape honoring the deceased. The light on each vessel dims at the end of a year, marking a transition in mourning, a reassertion of life, and readiness for the system to accept and honor another loss.

In this vast new public territory, semi-private, sheltered spaces are nested amidst communal processions and large ceremonial areas for funerals, weddings, concerts, yoga... The stages of grief are respected, but not cloistered.  Five miles of walking and bike paths and processional funerary routes thread through the memorial landscape, supporting bicycles, music, laughter, life...  This place of remembrance is defined by, and continually fortified with the cycles and energies of urban life.

The night sky is illuminated by memorial constellations – glowing public parks shimmering with imprints of intimate individual memory.