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 Guardian

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. — Houston Chronicle

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

Nestled in the mountains near the northern coastline of Taiwan, just outside of its capital, is a tower that, once full, will house the ashes of 400,000 people.

At 20 stories tall, the True Dragon Tower is the biggest columbarium in the world. It’s a striking manifestation of two problems plaguing countries all around Asia—a rapidly aging population, and a lack of space for the dead in urban centers. — Quartz

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

There, divergent life stories come to the same anonymous end. — the New York Times

Aldo Rossi’s addition to the San Cataldo Cemetery is a paragon of postmodern architecture, seeing the cemetery up close exposes some of the style’s major shortcomings.

[...] all you’ve got left is a half-empty, unfinished cemetery with assorted maintenance equipment left lying around. Perhaps you can keep drawing meaning from this decay. But lord knows it’s difficult to sustain a deep engagement with life and death after you’ve tripped over a garden hose. — failedarchitecture.com

Le Corbusier designed a pair of markers in the style of one of his own concrete architectural models.

Carlo Scarpa, who was buried standing up and wrapped in linen in the style of a medieval knight, has a marble grave with a maze-like design.

Frank Lloyd Wright's marker could not even be called a gravestone, because it looks more like an uncut rock.

Meanwhile, Buckminster Fuller's grave has an esoteric quote he once gave to Playboy magazine inscribed on it: "Call me Trimtab." — curbed.com

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. — thestranger.com

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... — theatlantic.com