Identity, contemplation and the elicitation of memory: from traditional cemetery to meaningful places for reflection
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Date
2016
Authors
Struthers, Renee
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Abstract
In contemporary North America, complacency overwhelms our death-care industry, where spaces lack meaning, innovation and sensorial significance. This practicum project aims to address the phenomenological role of the interior in enlivening and bringing rich meaning to spaces for death in the 21st century context. Many factors contribute to the changing values placed on death and its surrounding processes and corresponding environments, many resulting from a prominence in individualism as a contemporary social construct. In studying past practices related to death and death spaces, the elicitation of memory through design, and of the role of phenomenological design in substantiating identity at a time of loss, the aim of this practicum project is to design a non-sectarian death space. A space that breaks open the barriers currently placed on grief, echoing and supporting the dichotomy and gravity of loss in the contemporary context.
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Keywords
death, interior design, death spaces, phenomenology, memory, ritual, funeral home, columbarium, mausoleum, sensory design, urban integration