AR Reading List 050: death

We imagine worlds for every stage we move through life, but still our final encounter with the built world remains a relatively untrodden site. By not confronting the notion that we will all one day die, there is little room to think about how, where, and when this might happen. From the hospital bed to the graveside, this week’s Reading List edges closer to that last meeting. In AR March 2021, Karla Rothstein and Christina Staudt imagined a rethink of care at the end of life and in death. In contrast, Tiffany Lambert considered the work and lives of Arakawa and Gins, two artists-turned-architects who ‘decided not to die’. Both pieces are featured here, lying between stories on dying and death in this century and last, and the spaces and places built to hold the goodbyes.

Reputations: Arakawa (1936-2010) and Gins (1941-2014), AR March 2021, Tiffany Lambert
‘Arakawa and Gins put architecture in the service of the mutable body. Central to this ideology is the notion that architecture can aid in the structuring of the self’

Dust to dust: Bushey New Cemetery, Hertfordshire, UK, by Waugh Thistleton Architects, AR February 2020, Catherine Slessor
‘When the structures are eventually demolished, their rammed-earth walls, drawn from the ground they sit on, will crumble into dust, mirroring the destiny of those who rest in their shadow’

John Soane and the furniture of death, AR March 1978, John Summerson
‘The display of urns and sarcophagi and the designing of mausolea were part of Soane’s projection of himself as the great scholar-architect, the earnest preserver of the antique or, as in the monk’s tomb, the fanciful parodist of a fashion he despised’

Living death: confronting mortality and associated practices of care, AR March 2021, Karla Rothstein and Christina Staudt
‘Each death is unique. Geographically dispersed, socialised in varying legal and cultural institutions, and belonging to diverse faith traditions (or none), communities seek compatible ways to integrate this enigmatic event into the fabric of life’

Garden of death and dreams: Brion Cemetery by Carlo Scarpa, AR September 1985, Peter Buchanan
‘Turning back, and looking into the pool one can see facetted forms in concrete, lurking like-alligators below the surface, echoes perhaps of sunken cities such as Venice may one day become’

Dark tourism: questioning how we memorialise tragedy, AR April 2020, Darren Anderson
‘We can treat terrible things that happened to other people as entertaining stories and the memorials erected to them as just backdrops for our narcissistic indulgences and days-out as comfortable tourists’

Dying with Dignitas, AR November 2016, Jack Self
‘As the sole example of an entirely new type of architecture, it is underwhelming. More than that, it is uncanny. But until global society becomes more accustomed to the economics of contemporary death, there is unlikely to be any advance of the type’