Don't Fear the Reaper

This project is an investigation into the rituals and practices in death and dying across cultures. Opposing the current paradigm of elderly care, which seeks to sadistically extend life at any cost, this project seeks to re familiarize the American culture with the natural act of dying and death. Borrowing rituals from broad range of religion and cultures, the program and architecture are sculpted simultaneously, creating a series of interventions and practices that collectively lead one through a ritual of saying goodbye.

The rituals and architectures are both heavily dependent on the natural cycles of light, where specific building elements are sculpted by sun angles during specific times of the day and the year. The ebb and flow of natural and artificial light dictates the progress from ritual to ritual, and is indicative of the natural cyclical process of life.

The final part of the project is a columbarium, one where the urns of the dead themselves become the building block for a perpetually growing and shifting wall. The wall gradually overtakes the entirety of the site, mapping the registry of the dead and acting as a living, unstable, unfinished architecture.