e is already happening in the town of Redditch, Worcestershire in the UK, where since 2013 waste heat has been diverted from the municipal crematorium to heat a local swimming pool.
As expected, this proposal attracted controversy upon its announcement, but the local council was soon celebrated for its ecological innovation. New infrastructures and architectures for death will inevitably face public outcry when they arrive, but it is precisely this taboo attitude to death and the bodies of the deceased that the DeathLAB and Princeton researchers seek to challenge. As Rothstein explains, “Engaging the conversation on how we will address death in increasingly dense cities is an essential component of any serious investigation of urban evolution in the twenty-first century and beyond.”
The Princeton research has also found that public attitudes to rituals of death are not as rigid as we might assume. Gertler and Bragado found that in South Korea crematia has evolved from being a marginal and taboo practice to the preferred death ritual for ninety percent of the population within the last twenty years. This rapid change came as a result of the spatial limitations of an increasingly urban population, meaning traditional practices (domestic family-mourning ceremonies in a madang courtyard) were not feasible in apartment settings, illustrating how our attitudes to death evolve with social, technological and architectural changes.
What this research exposes is that to blindly persist with current orthodoxies in our infrastructures of mortality would be to the detriment of our urban environment and our relationship with death. The propositions put forward by the DeathLAB and Princeton researchers envisage a future where death technologies are “more socially productive, more desirable in urban terms, greener and more materially valuable” according to Bragado. Amidst these propositions and speculations, there is one certainty: death is coming. It’s up to us to decide how we deal with it.
– George Kafka
– Karla Rothstein is an architect and educator. Founder and Director of Columbia University’s trans-disciplinary DeathLAB, Rothstein is adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP. deathlab.org
– Miles Gertler and Igor Bragado began their collaboration at Princeton University and founded their practice, Common Accounts, together in 2014. Their forthcoming book, The Architecture of Everyday Death, presents their research on the city and the business of death.
For more musings on architecture for the departed, visit uncube issue no.38: Death.