Memento Mori: Death in the City
PGDip 6
RIBA Yorkshire Student Awards 2012: Bronze Award
The Thesis aims to explore the theme of death, dying and the dead body and how this relates to architecture.
The wider theme of death has been dealt with by society in many different ways throughout history yet in this modern era death has become a taboo subject that we do not talk about. The suppressed fear of death has forced our society to end up in a situation where people face real horrors at the end of life, simply because we cannot face dealing with the issue of how people should exit life.
The whole notion of death has been pushed from urban centres, with vast cemeteries and hospitals constructed on the outskirts of cities – death now seems to have no place in the modern urban environment.
“Death has been torn out of the heart of the city and a significant part of the city has died as a result”
(Heathcote, 1998).
The project will look at re-injecting this important aspect of human existence not only back into the city, but back into people’s lives, and explore whether it is possible to do this after the experience of death has become increasingly isolated and isolating and has been almost completely removed from sight.
The proposal looks at transforming Hope Street, which connects Liverpool’s two cathedrals, into an extraordinary street with a series of interventions along a processional route devoted to death, dying and the dead body.
The First part of the sequence offers a place in which the people of the city can come at the end of their lives. A place where they can come to terms with the enormity of what is about to happen and where they can look out over the city and reflect on the life they have lived there.
The second intervention is the main focus of the wider design project and is an adaptable framework, in which people can perform rituals and ceremonies, with the aim of promoting the sharing of memories and stories of the deceased. Over time a repository of memories would build up, creating a place that is connected with all the locations of the city, since every family will have the memories of some relative transcribed and archived within the walls of the structure.
The final intervention looks at reopening the processional carriage ramps and bricked up catacombs of St. James cemetery, at the end of Hope Street, to create a crematorium and columbarium within the existing structures.
