I became interested in death and its relationship with architecture a few years ago when my grandmother died. We were very close and she played a central role in my childhood, teaching me to read and treating me to long summer months at her house gardening and playing cards. Even though she died at the grand old age of 91, her death came as a shock.
The funeral and subsequent ‘scattering of the ashes’ (such a phrase makes it sound more reverential than it actually was) were an emotionless ordeal that furnished little solice and no cultural, symbolic or religious function. A drab and cold crematorium, a nylon velvet curtain, an engineering-brick walled garden of remembrance and a sea of polished marble plaques. I found it almost unbelievable, given that death is so central to the human condition; how has the architectural response to death become so marginalized?
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