In the eighteenth century Paris underwent a remarkable transformation in Western attitudes about life and death. The Architecture of Death traces this change through six pivotal decades, and analyzes the intellectual and social concerns that led to the establishment of a new kind of urban institution - the municipal cemetery. Drawing heavily on new materials and archival sources, supported by nearly 270 plans, photographs, and drawings, the book is not only a definitive work on the design of cemeteries but is also the cultural history of an age.
In the nineteenth century, new cemeteries were built in many Italian cities that were unique in scale and grandeur, and which became destinations on the Grand Tour. From the Middle Ages, the dead had been buried in churches and urban graveyards but, in the 1740s, a radical reform across Europe prohibited burial inside cities and led to the creation of suburban burial grounds. Italy’s nineteenth-century cemeteries were distinctive as monumental or architectural structures, rather than landscaped gardens. They represented a new building type that emerged in response to momentous changes in Italian politics, tied to the fight for independence and the creation of the nation-state. As the first survey of Italy’s monumental cemeteries, the book explores the relationship between architecture and politics, or how architecture is formed by political forces. As cities of the dead, cemeteries mirrored the spaces of the living. Against the backdrop of Italy’s unification, they conveyed the power of the new nation, efforts to construct an Italian identity, and conflicts between Church and state. Monumental cemeteries helped to foster the narratives and mentalities that shaped Italy as a new nation.
This is a study of buildings created to honour the dead. It explores the links between socio-religious and existential perceptions of death and how this has been interpreted in architecture over the 20th century.
Architecture Post Mortem surveys architecture’s encounter with death, decline, and ruination following late capitalism. As the world moves closer to an economic abyss that many perceive to be the death of capital, contraction and crisis are no longer mere phases of normal market fluctuations, but rather the irruption of the unconscious of ideology itself. Post mortem is that historical moment wherein architecture’s symbolic contract with capital is put on stage, naked to all. Architecture is not irrelevant to fiscal and political contagion as is commonly believed; it is the victim and penetrating analytical agent of the current crisis. As the very apparatus for modernity’s guilt and unfulfilled drives-modernity’s debt-architecture is that ideological element that functions as a master signifier of its own destruction, ordering all other signifiers and modes of signification beneath it. It is under these conditions that architecture theory has retreated to an 'Alamo' of history, a final desert outpost where history has been asked to transcend itself. For architecture’s hoped-for utopia always involves an apocalypse. This timely collection of essays reformulates architecture’s relation to modernity via the operational death-drive: architecture is but a passage between life and death. This collection includes essays by Kazi K. Ashraf, David Bertolini, Simone Brott, Peggy Deamer, Didem Ekici, Paul Emmons, Donald Kunze, Todd McGowan, Gevork Hartoonian, Nadir Lahiji, Erika Naginski, and Dennis Maher.
The Death of Drawing explores the causes and effects of the epochal shift from drawing to computation as the chief design and communication medium in architecture. Drawing both framed the thinking of architects and organized the design and construction process to place architects at its center. Its displacement by building information modeling (BIM) and computational design recasts both the terms in which architects think and their role in building production. Author David Ross Scheer explains that, whereas drawing allowed architects to represent ideas in form, BIM and computational design simulate experience, making building behavior or performance the primary object of design. The author explores many ways in which this displacement is affecting architecture: the dominance of performance criteria in the evaluation of design decisions; the blurring of the separation of design and construction; the undermining of architects’ authority over their projects by automated information sharing; the elimination of the human body as the common foundation of design and experience; the transformation of the meaning of geometry when it is performed by computers; the changing nature of design when it requires computation or is done by a digitally-enabled collaboration. Throughout the book, Scheer examines both the theoretical bases and the practical consequences of these changes. The Death of Drawing is a clear-eyed account of the reasons for and consequences of the displacement of drawing by computational media in architecture. Its aim is to give architects the ability to assess the impact of digital media on their own work and to see both the challenges and opportunities of this historic moment in the history of their discipline.
The definitive monograph on Swedish modernist architect Sigurd Lewerentz. Sigurd Lewerentz (1885-1975) is one of the most highly revered--as well as one of the most heavily mythologized--protagonists of modern European architecture. Arguably Sweden's most distinguished modernist, he is more influential for architects around the world today than he was during his lifetime. Countless architecture lovers from around the world visit his buildings. Stockholm's woodland cemetery Skogskyrkogården, his most significant contribution to landscape design, is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. This authoritative new monograph on Sigurd Lewerentz is based on extensive research undertaken at ArkDes, Sweden's national center for architecture and design, where his archive and personal library are kept. It features a wealth of drawings and sketches, designs for furniture and interiors, model photographs, and more from his estate, most of which are published here for the first time, alongside new photographs of his realized buildings. Essays by leading experts explore Lewerentz's life and work, his legacy, and lasting significance from a contemporary perspective. This substantial, beautifully designed book offers the most comprehensive survey to date of Lewerentz's achievements in all fields of his multifaceted work.
Emergencies—landing a malfunctioning plane, resuscitating a heart attack victim, or avoiding a head-on car crash—all require split-second decisions that can mean life or death. Fortunately, designers of life-saving products have leveraged research and brain science to help users reduce panic and harness their best instincts. Life and Death Design brings these techniques to everyday designers who want to help their users think clearly and act safely.
Despite seven out of ten people in Scotland choosing cremation, in many ways crematoria are 'invisible' buildings, visited only by necessity, and they have not received the attention they deserve. Crematoria present a real challenge for architects. They are paradoxical buildings: religious and secular, functional and symbolic, required to satisfy the practical and emotional needs of all faiths and none. This book provides architectural 'biographies' of Scotland's thirty-one crematoria, explaining their increasing relevance in contemporary Scottish society and pointing to Scotland's distinctive contribution to the progress of cremation and the architecture of crematoria. Many leading architects and craftsmen, including Sir Robert Lorimer and Sir Basil Spence, produced designs of great architectural merit, and Scottish local authorities led the way in designing some of the most progressive crematoria in the UK. These singular, often contested buildings, many in magnificent natural landscape settings, reveal a great deal about the complex, changing and distinctive attitudes to death and funeral rituals in Scotland.