References

Post Burial is a body of design research that pursues a funerary architecture aligned closely to an ecological, social, and increasingly agnostic sensibility towards memorisation and the cemetery.

Through propositional research, the work is anchored around architectural interventions that critically engage with a post-human interpretation of the role of the cemetery in the city, along with the language and orchestration of the architectures that sit within. From the urban scale to the individual monument, the cemetery as a formal manifestation of individual defiance in the face of mortality is constantly interrogated through images, models and archival representation. The constructed value and imbued symbolism of western funerary architecture is traced and compared to parallel philosophies that operate across religious, spiritual and secular boundaries. As a spatial investigation, the project uses Kensal Green Cemetery as a incredibly rich and important site of a functioning urban cemetery, typical of the Victorian condition and it’s slow evolution over the decades, but also as a propositional site, where an alternative philosophy can operate within the social, political and environmental context of Kensington and Chelsea.

The research is an opportunity to imagine how the presence of death in our cities can affect how we interact and comprehend it’s architecture, engaging with the multitude of temporalities that are forever overlapping, intertwining and interacting in our everyday. The presence of nature, at once a primal and regenerative affect on it’s surroundings, is the essence of our shared human condition. Our current epoch, socially and culturally, demands a regenerative and sustainable approach to death that is untethered from the necessity of the individual plots of earth and the ecologically disastrous consequences of modern cremation. There is a need for spaces and rituals that are receptive to our individual and shared temporal restraints along with the ambiguous quest for individual meaning, challenging foundational values that oscillate violently though the societal impact of the 4th ndustrial revolution and the 6th mass extinction. Though a re-assessment of the autonomy of architecture in these contexts, it must work communicatively on both conscious and sub-conscious levels, considering the craft, materiality and ritualistic aspects of architecture as opportunities to explore the poetic narratives of each.

Throughout the immediate few weeks, I will write here about how some of these more ambiguous terms are defined, their position within the relevant theoretical fields, along with their architectural manifestations. To begin, as perhaps the most ambiguous (yet vital) term of this project is that of the post-human. Next week I will summarise the key literature in this rapidly expanded field of philosophical enquiry that scrutinises the very definition of the term “human” and speculates on a world that decentralises the humanistic desire of eternity and entitlement that projects throughout much of western history.