"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.
— Brendan Kiley, The Stranger
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.
27 Comments
I love this idea. I wish that we weren't so afraid of death in our society. Death is just a different state of being from the state of awareness and action that we are all in now.
I don't disagree, Quondam, that life simply ends. A "different state of being" means your body enters a decay state instead of an active state. The decay is fast at first, then slow for a long, long time. That's it.
As Louis CK says, lots of things happen after you die, they just don't involve you.
Also the fear of compost spreading disease is addressed in the article.
see also earlier... i love the communal aspect of this proposal.
Oof, how did I miss Amelia's post on the same article?! My mistake.
I mean this image is just ...!
^ cool image
My personal beliefs aside,
I can not imagine any politician on either side of the aisle touching this with a 10 foot pole.
The funeral industry is a 20.7 billion dollar a year business in the U.S. alone.
With all of the problems in the world, I think the time and resources would be better spent on something that at least had even a slight chance of working instead of something so quixotic.
+++ 'nerd
One can postulate any number of scenarios that might change the way bodies are disposed of from lack of developable property to Soylent Green, but it will always be a matter of economics.
First, we currently pump bodies full of chemicals and put them in the ground. There's little disagreement that this practice is not good for the quality of soil or groundwater.
Nerd and Miles: the article (do you guys read them?) says that interest in "green" burials has skyrocketed in recent years (and many other sources on current death practices I've read over the last two years say the same). People do, already, pay high sums of money to be buried in "green cemeteries" where they can be deposited, sans embalming, into the ground in linen shrouds. This project is far from the only proposal to be looking at composting bodies - this is just the only one that brings an urban, architectural component to it.
I think it's a beautiful idea and a beautiful building.
When I first saw the name I thought, people are just getting around to Kate Spade wanting to use decomposed bodies, she's been doing that for years.
I wrote this almost 10 years ago at the end of my travel diary feature. It clearly shows my position on the issue.
"I want to live long, but I want to be buried there when I die, my dead flesh fertilizing the dirt, perhaps helping a fig tree to grow. I must do my duty as the ones before me did. I do see my father's eyes when I look at an olive tree near his grave. It matters.
Some human spirits are products of race and some are of geography. I am the latter kind.
I could also help an oak tree in SoCal, my second home, but not to a grass lawn cemetery with designer tombstone, chances are there and I would not want to take that risk over my dead body...
I am against cremation for it is not a sustaining practice.
Nov./Dec.,2006"
@Donna Sink
Death is just a different state of being from the state of awareness and action that we are all in now.
How do you know that?
Donna, I am not saying I disagree with the idea.
There is also something else. I believe a lot of people feel differently about death. Some people need a place were they can pay respects to their loved ones and generalize that need to include everybody.
Some friends of mine went to Gettysburg and when they came back, they were livid with anger that frisbee and picnics were taking place on hallowed ground. I can see their point.
I think this belief will be harder to overcome than either the political untenability or the economics.
Culture is strong, but often driven by economics. Churches are now front men for funeral services, mortuaries, organists, florists, burial plots, etc. and they take a cut too. One-stop shopping and a hell of a sales pitch.
Now that I think about it, Architects may be better at designing for the dead than the living
Designing for the living dead, aka masters of the universe.
After all, what are megamansions but living mausoleums?
Unamuno, what I know about the physical state of bodily death is mostly learned from a few books, including Stiff by Mary Roach, Down on the Body Farm by Rod Werner in Archinect's first Bracket, and some articles in Discover Magazine and whatnot, as well as my sister's medical degree experience (I got to go see the cadavers with her).
The designers here have their hearts in the right place, but the problem isn't architectural, and their answer is super creepy.Green burial seems to me like the right way to deal with human remains -- let nature do what it has always done.
We don't need to go inventing new rituals or building infrastructure to improve the way we deal with death. That building would be a horror show. You folks have smelled dead things, right?
anonitect: composting done correctly does not have a bad smell. It smells like earth.
And if we stop inventing new rituals are we still a culture?
Culture is about maintaining rituals. New rituals must develop from existing ones if they are to be culturally relevant.
Composting vegetable matter smells like earth. Composting 150 lb. sacks of meat is a different story. The industrial composting facilities that accept meat scraps for high temperature composting aren't the sort of places you'd want to bring mourners, I don't think.
@Donna Sink
Do you know what is Being? It is philosophical question...
The link you gave me, no question it is wonderful, but it has got nothing to do with awareness and Being.
I guess I know as much about being as does any human, but it's not one of my primary interests. Cosmology exhausts me.
anonitect you're being (heh) somewhat close-minded about this, I think. Aren't architects really good at looking at the problems of a given technology or ritual and addressing them? We use things like HVAC, after all.
@Donna
No, all due respect, your clime went beyond "knowing as much as any human does"
you said this; Death is just a different state of being from the state of awareness and action that we are all in now.
So you know a different state of being?
And I may ask what is awareness? how do you know you are aware of things?
It is a very tough question, the question not even Descartes or even Kant was unable to fully answer to.
And here, on this blessed portal, a pretty architect states what is Being and awareness :(
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against your thoughts, but in nowadays we architects clime that we are equally good at everything whither it is Philosophy, Art, politics, social issues and everything, but in fact we aren't, we are the most superficial type of people...
p.s. it is not cosmology...
p.s.s this oriental philosophical mindset is a dangerous thing
Donna, No, architects don't have any special claim to being problem solvers. If you look at the problem that the designers are addressing in this instance - the unnaturalness and unsustainability of the funeral industry - it's something that we could remedy simply by reverting to pre-embalming burial practices. (Which would have to be done safely) Paper architecture seems to involve a lot of holistic systems - trying to solve multiple problems with a single gesture - that just won't work in reality. Maybe the project can be seen as a conversation starter - get people thinking about their own burial preferences.
Unamuno: "a pretty architect " Really? That's how you engage with other people, with women?
Your questions are so passive aggressive. Say what you mean.
"If you look at the problem that the designers are addressing in this instance - the unnaturalness and unsustainability of the funeral industry - it's something that we could remedy simply by reverting to pre-embalming burial practices."
This exactly.
@Unamuno
What has Donna's appearance ("a pretty architect") got to do with her opinion?
anonitect, I totally disagree that architects don't have a special claim to being problem solvers. In some ways it's one of the few claims we have: we look at what exists, then imagine how it could change for the better. That's looking at a problem and solving it.
Reverting to pre-embalming burial techniques is fine, but aren't we, as architects, supposed to see when and where we can kill two birds with one stone? I always tell my residential remodel clients if their house is ripped up anyway they might as well go ahead and do as much as they can at the same time - it's much harder to find the willpower to start up the same issue again later, even if your intentions are good.
I *do* think this proposal is a conversation starter. But I also don't think it's absolutely out of the realm of reality that a burial process similar to this could become common practice eventually, and there is no reason architects can't be the ones talking about it. We've been part of the conversation in sustainable design, in transit infrastructure, in farmer's markets, in housing...
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