SPACES FOR MOURNING- Redefining Pet Care and Memorialization

International Journal for Research in Applied Science & Engineering Technology (IJRASET), 2022

Life and death are perpetual topics for human beings to investigate. The basic kind of funeral architecture is cemeteries, which serve as the final resting place for humans and their final homes. The demand for cities has been highlighted as a result of population growth. This research focuses on the spaces linked to a multi-faith cemetery as well as the types of spaces that evoke emotions throughout the death process. For the research, four main religions were chosen: Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Zoroastrianism. The aim of the research is to find out the emotional aspect and spatial character of the space associated with deceased. The main research topic was: what effect do emotional elements have on death places and what are the design criteria for highrise cemeteries in metropolitan areas? According to the findings of this study, emotions such as mourning or grief, as well as remembrance processes, were major preoccupations. It also indicates that all faiths' funeral practises and ceremonies have a similarity, as well as shared concepts about death. The study's result offers a fresh perspective on how the architectural character of spaces aids in coping with the emotions associated with death.

Design Issues

The environmental and social imperatives of twenty-first century cities require a rethinking of mortuary practices. Cemeteries across the globe are nearing capacity, and the number of deaths annually in the United States is increasing as the post-World War II generation ages. Despite their depletive and harmful environmental effects, casketed burial, cremation, and embalming have informed perceptions and policies, truncating access to alternatives. Although today's increasingly secular urban populations, for whom the health of the planet is paramount, are disconnected from “traditional” funerary rites, the importance of transitional mortal ritual endures. Through two design projects—one in an existing Victorian cemetery in Bristol, England, and the other augmenting iconic public infrastructure in New York City—this article argues for the potential of new disposition methods and enhanced public space. Countering the conventional dissociation of cemeteries from daily life, these n...

Craft and Design Enquiry, 2015

In his book Last Landscapes (2003), Ken Warpole notes that, for a number of reasons, cemetery architecture is the most conservative aspect of the institutions and practices surrounding death and memorialisation in the West. This is starting to change, with designers and architects responding to the groundswell of sentiment demanding that we moderns modernise our ceremonies and associated institutions. In the following essay, I look at the different demands and opportunities in urban and rural cemetery design, and focus on the multifunctional roles that cemeteries have played in the past and might yet play again. This essay is the meeting place of previous work on paddock architecture in the Australian landscape and a recent project looking at death and the landscape. I am interested in the ways that design might respond to the nexus identified by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk as ‘reactionary religion and progressive technological medicine’ (2013: 421), which can bar the possibility of a dignified death and a dignifying place for the dead among the living. This doesn’t mean a return to the ostentation of Victorian mourning rituals or adopting the ‘death as party’ practices of Ghana or Mexico—which isn’t to say we can’t learn anything from these. Instead, the task seems to be finding a way to give meaning to the values of specific lives and the contexts in which they are embedded, and to provide better support structures (both material, atmospheric and symbolic) for those who gather around the absence created by the departed.

Monuments to the dead are plentiful in all cultures throughout time. Architecture has developed throughout various cultures and times in order to help us deal with death and mark its presence. From the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York, NY we use the creation of space to commemorate and heal. These architectures house a collective memory of its inhabitants or honorees but what of the deaths that may not be linked to cultural or national tragedies? In death we all deserve respect and those that we leave deserve a beautiful place to mourn us. The mausoleum is architecture that allows both to be housed in one space that can be designed for various cultural and religious ceremonies and observances. Numerous visual references to death in the cemetery, on grave markers and in mausoleums have developed over the years as our cultures have changed and merged, as noted in The American Resting Place by Marilyn Yalom. Architecture students should experience this type of studio project in order to understand and develop the complex symbolic and psychological spaces that are needed in our society to help us deal with our mortality.

Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Dwelling Form (IDWELL 2020)

As most cities are rapidly expanding, space of death, such as a cemetery, is in demand. In a metropolitan like Jakarta where the population grows rapidly, land for the dead competes with the urgent needs of urban development. It is often used not only for death purposes but also for everyday needs. A cemetery is a place where sacredness and banality occur. At Taman Pemakaman Umum (TPU or Public Cemetery in English) Tanah Kusir, a well-known cemetery in South Jakarta, people do not only bury, do a pilgrimage, or perform religious rituals about death. They also use it for commerce, a shortcut, a place for animal care, and other activities. This paper shows our preliminary study on how TPU Tanah Kusir as a public space provides space of death while accommodating inevitable banal activities. We analyzed its physical feature and people's thought about it. We then defined the circumstances that make it both private and public in order to comprehend its role as a public space. The overlapping sacred value and its daily uses have made TPU Tanah Kusir become a heterotopic space. Our study shows that grave ownership and its accessibility determined the cemetery's spatial characteristics.

Emotion, Space and Society

Theory and Event, 2022

This article analyzes the investment of contemporary political techniques in the destruction and building anew of urban spaces of violence in relation to the politics of collective memory. Using the framework of necropolitics, I show that the spatial methods of necropolitics, such as destruction, bulldozing, and infrastructural warfare, work to regulate collective memory on both the involuntary and traumatic levels. Critical engagement with the necropolitical work of memory, opens the possibility of another kind of archive that forges counter-memories from out of necropolitical spaces.

POLITesi - Archivio digitale delle tesi di laurea e di dottorato, 2020

From a historico-philosophical reading of graveyards and their development into the modern cemetery form, the thesis investigates the political scope of funerary spaces by articulating concepts of territoriality, politics, and monumentality. The role of architecture as the formalising element of death will be illustrated through paradigmatic examples in history, with fictional or unrealised project for cemeteries offering a glimpse into the potential for cemeteries to operate either as enforcers of societal norms or as transgressors to them. The central portion of this work puts forth a succinct architectural theory for the contemporary large-scale cemetery. Arguments are drawn from a range of urban theories, in particular those of Aldo Rossi in L'architettura della città and of O.M. Ungers in Die Stadt in der Stadt. The contradictions that arise from such an operation are not wholly denied nor embellished. Instead, a series of exits towards expanded readings of death in the contemporary city are proposed. These ramifications are characterised by the problematisation of death and its spaces outside of traditional architectural theory and towards issues of identity, nationhood, and signification in the age of global migration flows and the dissolution of unitarian identities. With a critical understanding of death and monumentality established, the thesis shifts its attention to one specific cemetery case, Cimitero Maggiore in Milan, and develops a global analysis of it on both urban architectural levels. Accompanying the text are a series of schemes and illustrations by the author which suggest an alternative mode of thinking of the cemetery's future by proposing analogies to the city and its diverse architectural types. This graphic conclusion posits the possibility of conceiving an architecture for death which fosters open-ended narratives for a society increasingly marked by diversity in faith, norms and identity.

2016

The connections between architecture and remembrance are well-known and have several layers of meaning. I would like to express a possible interpretation of this relationship, focusing on some contemporary memorial places in Europe and Budapest, which are strongly based on architectural viewpoints. At the end of the 20 th and the beginning of the 21 st century, some very impressive examples can be recognized that are not narrative, do not have a direct message or ideological atmosphere, but can involve the spectators to participate in the very complicated process of memory (we can mention Peter Eisenmann's well-known Mahnmal-project in Berlin or Gunter Demnig's concept of 'Stolpersteine'.) The topic is extremely complex in Central-Eastern Europe, where the history of the 20 th century caused a lot of traumas. In 2014, I was the leader of a postgraduate architectural school's architect group which won a competition for the World War 2 memorial place of Eötvös Lórá...

In modern western city death is wiped out. It is almost as if did not existed – every sign of it is being cleaned away as soon as it happens. However, there are practices that conflict with this order. These are street memorials marking the sites of death. In this paper I will trace the brief history of this phenomenon.