I WAS HERE. HERE I WAS. WAS I HERE? YES I WAS!

IMPRINTS

We constantly strive to mark the world with an imprint of our passing. Graffiti on the school desk, padlocks on the Ponte Milvio in Rome, updating a Facebook status, all are attempts to externalise the internal consciousness – to fix time, making that which fleeting, concrete. These are memorials to self.

CONTEXT TO OURSELVES

Taken individually these may be an exercise in vanity, albeit a universal one – but collectively they provide context to ourselves. The mundanities of life are concurrent from person to person whatever country or background, and so making them accessible allows us to relate to these people, to see that their fears are our fears, our desires are their desires.

 

MUNDANITIES OF LIFE

The present day is readily available to us, but this interaction with the past is less accessible.

Everyman...reaches out into the distant country of the past to inform his present and his future. Without this historical knowledge, this memory of things said and done, his today would be aimless and his tomorrow without significance (Carl Becker) 

The desire for this sense of context is shown by the popularity of historical dramas on television, archaeology, documentary – all of these are concerned with presenting the day to day, but from a different time. Yet it is one thing to learn about history, but another to truly within it. That feeling when someone asks you ‘Where were you when...?’ – the planes crashed into the Twin Towers, the Berlin Wall fell, when Kennedy was shot – and you remember, and you realise you share a moment in history with everyone.

SHARED POINT IN TIME

The one place that is synonymous with this realisation is the cemetery or memorial. Who does not check the age of the people buried there against their own – placing their death against your life? It is a place where the palimpsests of the community are made visible. At the same time, the cemetery is where this realisation is most required. During the trauma of bereavement is when we most need a connection to the world around us, back through time, and forwards into the future.

BACK THROUGH TIME & FORWARDS INTO THE FUTURE

We need to develop a typology for memorial that allows this connection, making it accessible not just to those who need it most, but to everyone in the day to day in order that today is not aimless and tomorrow has significance.

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I AM BATMAN!

BATMAN ISSUE 001 - Image via Daily News

Architects should act as detective, observing from within the landscape they hope to affect. Sometimes this may involve using the methods and mindsets of the characters with whom they hope to interact.

In order to act effectively against crime, Batman places his actions from within the mental worlds of the criminal. Equally the architect, in the mental worlds of the bereaved, of the homeless, or of the pleasure seeker.

If inhabitants of an observed world carry out their activies under shadow and behind masks of some kind, the architect should enter that world, put on the mask or dark cape. An architect should find a way to see through the eyes of the people who occupy the spaces upon which one hopes to act.

Much of what we are doing is changing the style of thinking - Wittgenstein

Perhaps I have blurred my point by centring it around a comic book character. Maybe the idea of architect as brooding anti-hero that sleeplessly solves urbanity as part of some obsessed solo mission is a step too far (or perhaps just too close to the plot of the Fountainhead). I'll save the aspects of Batman as representational of architectural mindscapes for another Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

For me to attempt a project in Korea about bereavement successfully, rather than just talking, or writing, or walking or seeing, as myself, I should retain the worlds that Koreans create for themselves within mine - Korean coloured bat-spectacles if you will.

KOREAN COLOURED BAT-PHONE? - image via Daily News

An analogue of Batman is not something to emulate in its entirety. Architects should be like Batman, but sometimes it is more effective to be like Bruce Wayne. Though part of the common places, and fully active within them, he still maintains the inner world of detective, periodicly re-entering the uncommon places costumed appropriately

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INTERNALS / number 1

Having made initial presentations about 6 FEET UP, and listened to the others of the Free Unit I wonder about the presentation that I didn't make. What did I leave out - what did I want to say? 

I am attempting to find an architecture for the bereaved. Support for the ending of other, not the end of self. Who are memorials really for any way? The inscriptions on a gravestone are not a means for the dead to cling to life, but for the living to connect to death. Here lies Alan, who died aged 45.  He is survived by Dorothy. I see this and think, ' I am 45, I have a wife, these are people connected to me, who thrive on my existance, and allow me to thrive. In considering how our lives combine, and intertwine, I begin to consider the mortality of the lives we cohabit.

Quality of death for the living - of comfort, support and security an end to architectural navel gazing - pushing the mindscape outwards!

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MANIFESTO / number 2

We have lost the reassurances of the unknown, replacing a confidence in the everafter with platitudes and gross consumerism. The purpose of 6 FEET UP is to provide a context for grief, to provide a contemporary ritual that refers to our psychological need to reconcile life with death, drawing from our culture and ritual heritage, yet recognising the concessions necessary in the modern world.aa

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MANIFESTO / number 1

A new comprehension is needed, of the typology of a site for mourning, of committal - to recognise death. We have moved our lives to the city - but our deaths are separated ever further in the land, under the hill or tree.

We have altered our practices and our rituals in tune with the progress of technology and the fashion of the times, but our simple need to reconcile death with life remains the same. This cannot be done by pushing the dead to the nearest strip of grass on the outskirts of the city.

Let us not cobble together some cold industrial process to faded images of our cultural heritage, but use technology to create a memorial that truly responds to the needs of our psychology. The memorial must respect our culture, in which our psychology is rooted, and in respect to our culture, bring that memorial back to where we live - into the city.

NAGASAKI GRAVEYARD 

photo by dsankt via sleepycity.org

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