Urban Necropolis
London, UK
Over the course of human history, the moment of death has marked the beginning of religious, cultural, and regional rituals during which the bodies of the deceased and the living traverse a sequence of architectural spaces before parting ways in an act of finality.
From the pyramids of ancient egypt to the zoroastrian towers of silence, these ancient architectures embodied clearly defined aesthetic, spatial, typological, phenomenological, and narrative qualities that served as highly specific sites for the performance of their respective “dances of the dead.”
Having stayed much the same since the age of industrialization, contemporary western burial procedures have promoted anachronistic architectures and sequences that remove the living--both those in some way related to the deceased and the general public, ‘strangers’ of the deceased--from these rituals of grief, burial, celebration, and remembrance.
With the migration of western society, in particular younger generations, away from adherence with organized religion and its procedures, traditional spaces and movements of death have become commercialized and de-sanctified. The vast majority of bodies in western cultures today are systematically processed in acontextual, factory-like warehouses, shuttled to and from removed architectures in demeaning fashions, and are often leveraged in the promotion of overpriced burial procedures by corporate bodies that profit from the emotional toll of loss.
Eight interventions, situated in and around london’s abney park cemetery, collage familiar, existing structures with ancient typologies and narrative spaces to create entirely new processions--theaters to house rituals of death-- in celebration of mortality, the non-hegemonic, and the ethnographical heterotopia of the site context.
Contemporary western society pretends that death does not exist by keeping corpses, bones, funerals, and mourning well out of sight and segregated from everyday life. These architectures challenge this relationship.
This project aims to reintroduce an honest sense of mortality into our lives through interventions in the built environment so that we can reengage with a respect for the realities of modern life rather than distancing ourselves from the fear of the unknown.
Intervention 1: Memorial To the Privileged
This intervention creates a sequence of spaces to house a new processional for those members of society who are afforded the privilege of grieving; the processional architecturalizes the five stages of grief in vignette moments:
1. Viewing chapel (denial)
2. Wailing chambers (anger)
3. Forced perspective memory theatre (bargaining)
4. Long forced perspective hallway (depression)
5. Spiral ramp ascending into the chapel (acceptance)
Located in a series architectural shells that originate in a storefront on Stoke Newington’s high street, the staging of this new typology within a familiar setting speaks to the commercialization of deathcare in London today, while its adjacency to the historical site of the Abney family house (the previous private owners of the land that the cemetery inhabits) relates the intervention back to its intended users, the privileged members of society who can afford the high street boutiques and would approach the act of the funeral as a transaction.
The spaces reference the Etruscan tumulus tomb and other ancient typologies in their form and programmatic intention; however, the rooms also have an ironic subversiveness in their intents.
Intervention 2: House Of the Divided
For those afflicted by the wounds of irreparable difference, mirrored processionals occur behind identical facing facades of dilapidated houses at the end of a residential street abutting the cemetery.
The insides are gutted and replaced with monumental stairs, which lead below ground. Before splitting, the divided members join for the last time to place the body in an elevator which lays between the two houses, and they re-join only once again to proceed along a route toward the chapel where the casket is held by both members, but covered down the middle with a fabric membrane, which allows sound to pass through but only glimpses of the other half.
Intervention 3: Tower of the Unrecognized Tragedy
For victims of and families affected by domestic, racially charged, and queer-targeted violence; Victims of human sex trafficking and the underground slave trade; Refugees of war and religious violence.
This tower is a call to arms, a stand against those who don’t care and those who engage in acts against the victimized. The ‘tower’ as a architectural typology has always been imbued with political meaning. In this case, it is taking a critical stance against those traditional virtues of masculinity and power associated with the phallic symbol. The tower is uninhabitable, simply a monument; where the windows would be, there are holes blocked off with brick. It does not look out and you cannot see in.
There is an inextinguishable fire that burns like a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, releasing smoke from the top of the tower, now a chimney, reminiscent of factory labor, chimney sweeps, and child slavery of the Victorian era. The choice to exactly replicate the form of the adjacent fire watchman’s tower located at the firestation next door is pointed, as we have civic programs to protect and watch out for the hegemonic members of society, but neglect or choose not to act as guardian for those most in need of our protection.
Intervention 4: Temple Of the Ego
For the magistrates, the public figures, the heads of state. The public face of a private life. For those who wished to be memorialized while still in the realm of the living, here their ego survives them as spectacle.
Originating behind a free-standing neoclassical building that breaks in form and style from its neighboring Georgian row houses, the processional begins in a monumental viewing chamber, where the body is placed upon a raised plinth, reminiscent of the funeral pyres of ancient heroes and funeral processions during the Victorian age. The facade is muted except for a large sculptural object that punctures the ceiling and channels light into the center of the room, drawing all attention onto the body.
Underground, the bodies of both the living and the dead process along a route that is based loosely on the plan of the Tomb of Agamemnon, one of the most significant and elaborate of the heroic tombs of the Mycenaean age. An algorithm collects the greatest moments from publicly accessible online personas and projects them as a highlight reel on the domed spaces, which are punctuated only by floating viewing platforms.
Material choices are hypercritical: the ornamentation and decoration evoke traditional notions of ‘femininity’ while inhabiting ‘masculine’ forms – clean, monumental, neoclassical geometries in pink marble. The confusion over the contrasting engenderment tactics invite skepticism and inspire critical thought.
Intervention 5: Theatre Of the Dead
For the staging of man’s greatest act; the surgical transmission of life from the dead or dying to the sustain the life of another through organ transplant.
Mirrored processionals for the dying and the dead have their own theatres, which are reflected within an old factory space. The stadium seating evokes the idea of the spectacle, with the ‘back of house’ being the opposing ritual (i.e. – the opposing ritual of the person receiving the organ is the person donating the organ). The bodies are placed and operated on upon raised plinths, monumentalising the act. The organ itself is transferred through the wall that separates the two, crossing (literally) the thin, liminal space between life and death.
Intervention 6: Mausoleum Of the Dispossessed
For the dispossessed members of society to be documented and remembered. This monumentalizes those who have been actively disregarded, not just forgotten. Not simply melancholic, this intervention is critically pointed.
In form, the bodies are received in the factory-like space above ground, housed in the bones of an unused waste processing facility for the park. Since the cemetery has stopped accepting new burials several decades ago, there are no longer decaying bodies to provide nutrients that feed the biodiversity of the park. So, the bodies of the dispossessed are cleaned and prepared for hydrolysis, the opposite form of cremation where a body is dissolved in an alkaline fluid, creating a nutritious fertilizer to feed the park adjacent. Before they are reduced to their liquid state, the heads of the dispossessed are scanned using a 3D body scanner and transcribed into data points, which are cataloged along with any known documents or information on them, and actualized into a 3D printed bust, using powdered bone dust left behind after hydrolysis as filament. This bust is placed within the mausoleum, and a digital record is kept in the ‘library’ spaces that fork off of the main monumental mausoleum space.
Intervention 7: Monument Of the Shamed
For the publicly shamed, victims of ignorance and bigotry, this space is offered as an asylum from the hegemonic, from the oppressors, from the power dynamics that stifle those who dare to break its rules. Wedged between two traditionally traumatic spaces for the non-hegemonic – a nunnery (religious dogma) and a common row house (domestic space), the tiny entrance abuts a wall that separates the religious land from the domestic land, and opens out to a processional outdoor pathway to the entrance to the below-ground space. This procession takes the form of a pergola, meant to evoke romantic notions of the garden, antiquity, peace, and nature. the arches of the pergola intersect the wall in an uncomfortable manner, a reminder of what looms behind the barrier.
This intervention subverts intentions of a traditional monument; the ‘monument’ is generally meant to celebrate the life of a member of society who has or had abided by the laws, customs, and traditions of the time. Very rarely is it meant to monumentalize acts of subversion of the law, subversion of the hegemonic, subversion of anything considered ‘normalcy.’
the militancy and strength of queer people most ‘othered’ -- trans women of color, drag queens, persons living with HIV/ AIDS -- in daring to face the seemingly unsurmountable patriarchal heteronormativity should solidify their place as martyrs, monumentalized in society for fighting for the right of queer people to pursue happiness and an authentic existence. The monument itself contains a sequence of spaces to process the body of someone shamed, but mirrored is a processional sequence of spaces for the living as well, including three important queer spatial typologies – the bath house, the theatre, and the communal kitchen, connected by a labyrinthine network of paths and tunnels that create a multiplicity of potential interactions. The paths of the living culminate in the Hall of the Shamed, in which a large domed oculus filters light and rainwater into a well beneath. One path leads to a dead end, which looks out onto the hall. On the opposite side of the space is a false balcony, styled in the fashion of the Juliet balcony in Verona, Italy. The inaccessibility of this balcony is symbolic, as queer people often struggle to identify with, and therefore feel that they have attained, heteronormative ideals of love and intimacy.
Intervention 8: Tomb Of the Suicide
For those who saw only one way to quell the voices that whisper to them in the night; their act is one of defiance, one of commitment, an act of choice, however tragic. Their decision to die should make us question our unwavering desire to continue living. This tomb is erected to honor those lives lost to themselves, memorializing them in honesty and integrity, rather than hiding their act in the shadow of society.
