ARC3015Y F
Instructors: Mary Louise Lobsinger, Pat Hanson
Meeting Section: L0101
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm; Friday, 2:00pm - 6:00pm
Location: TBD

Our studio invites students to engage in a design-thought experiment about the spatial logistics of the dead within the city of the living. We are interested in bringing a 21stcentury awareness to the entrenched myths and the brazen marketing-for-profits that shroud the spaces of bereavement and the rites associated with the cemetery as an urban institution. These spaces, idealized by the 19thcentury romanticpastoral, and in the contemporary city only vaguely registered as well-kept chemically enhanced lawns for passive leisure, are unsustainable. The urban cemetery is under pressure whether from demographics and cultural change or over-crowding and escalating property values that have housing for the living an urban crisis. Experts surmise that our attitude toward death obscures a problem that is urban and spatial, is about planning and sustainable practices, and needs to embrace new technologies as well as re-visit historic practices. Our preoccupations with curating our present lives in the moment, alongside the promises of digital afterlives, voice vaults, and A.I. re-enactments are thought to distract from thinking about the dead within urban life and the sustainability of interment as burial.

The spatial logistics of housing bodies engages questions of technical, symbolic, and ecological import for the architectural and the urban. The issue is global as evidenced in the apartment-like tower necropolis in Santos Brazil, Istanbul’s black-market economy for burial sites, high-priced New York City plots bartered on Craigslist, the burial plots dug 22 floors beneath Jerusalem, to Japan’s high-tech solutions involving digital tracking and robotic retrieval of death vessels to designated spaces of mourning. In Greece, Denmark, the U.K., the U.S.A., Canada, and in China, land is confiscated, bodies exhumed and reinterred to make way for hotels and highway interchanges. The urban pastoral cemetery signals issues of equity as premium priced plots reflect distributions of wealth. And, as Jessica Mitford recognized in her infamous 1963 exposé, “The American Way of Death”, the urban cemetery mirrors the prevailing social prejudices of the living, along lines of race, class, and religion. The North American obsession with “in perpetuity” is countered by statistics: a grave is visited at most once or twice a year for about ten years. And North American ‘traditions’, as marketed by corporate for-profit practices, are confronted with burial grounds inhabited by those deceased long before colonization. New practices are emerging. These include death doulas and natural burials, cremain constructed artificial reefs, Korean death beads, resomation or promession chosen over the high toxicity of CO2 emitting cremation by fire, short-term leased plots with bone re-interment to ossuaries, to community chambers and walls programmed for more than a single function.

The studio project is conceptualized around the idea of the vessel, the module of containment, a unit of storage, repeatable, serviceable, transformable and individualized within repetition. We want to play with the limits and the differences that arise in pursuit of the vessel, in tandem with the singularity of material choice, as explored through form and scale, through object, site, and city.

We have planned a short research trip to Mexico City to experience the Day of the Dead (November 1st to 6th). We intend to visit architectural offices and specific sites. Travel will offer an opportunity for students to recalibrate their project before the final stages of development, and to experience the celebration of the afterlife within life and a different way of living with the dead.

The term project will be sited in Toronto. We have identified specific sites along the green urban corridor extending from the Merton Street edge of Mount Pleasant Cemetery through the vales and along the roadways that lead to the historic St. Jamestown Cemetery and the Toronto Necropolis.

The studio subject matter is thematically rich and we will welcome varied explorations. The studio will focus on concept, design development and the transformations that enable a substantially realized project.

Loculus (Latin, "little place"), plural loculi, is an architectural compartment or niche that houses a body, as in a catacomb, hypogeum, mausoleum or other places of entombment. In classical antiquity, the mouth of the loculus might be closed with a slab,[1]as in the Catacombs of Rome, or sculptural, as in the family tombs of ancient Palmyra; more contemporary examples, the Igualada Cemetery in Spain, Chipperfield in Japan, Sam Jacob’s Highgate ‘ghostly’ re-enactment of Adolf Loos’s proposed memorial for art historian Max Dvorák, columbarium, chamber, charnel house, sepulcher, sarcophagus, crypt, grave, catacomb, vault, coffin, tower, cemetery, death chair, mausoleum, ossuarium, tomb, cell, tumuli, grotto, river, bead, weave, . . . . .