To the Meeting Place by annchanchan from denmark

Funerals are often being conceived as an one-off dramatic event. Family and friends gather with all their hearts with the deceased and hope their sorrows could be buried together with the dead bodies. After this day, they develop a habit of visiting the dead’s graves or urns in cemeteries or columbarium set far away outside the city once in a while. Granted, life goes on.

Who can say this is the best way to commemorate the dead people? Who can say this is the best way to heal sorrows? Who can say this is the best way to deal with dead bodies, for the family’s sake and for the city’s sake?

We have an idea of what a cemetery is but not what it should be. We tended to isolate and put a boundary to the places for dead people but why? Because of hygienic problems? With the advance in technology, it needs not to be so. My proposal adopts the technology of freeze-drying dead bodies developed in Sweden (Promession) as the future way of dead body handling. This might sound industrial but it could also be carried in the most humanistic approach.

Today we think we are too civilized to bury the dead in a hole we dig without an elaborately ornamented coffin. So here the modern knowledge of science comes. Technology has not just given us cremation which is popular among any world-leading civilizations nowadays. With the freeze-drying techniques, dead bodies are freezed and vibrated into organic powder. The powder could be put into the soil for new life to grow. The plant would be more than a symbol but a kind of physical artifice of the dead. And how can we just set these plants and vegetation related to our beloved to somewhere outside the city skirt and only visit them once or twice a year?

So hereby I propose to hold all these in our most intimate courtyard garden of where we live every day. In a lot of cities and culture, whether in Berlin or Shanghai, residential buildings are built in compounds and blocks forming their own internal courtyard. The courtyard space might be used as carpark, gardens, playground, etc. What is so special about these spaces are that they are informal, organic and totally reflect the everyday living of the residents. Courtyards are intimate yet they could be conceived as community public spaces. Having put the machines for the freeze-drying technology in the middle of a courtyard is a service to the community. These machines are not centralised in some parts of the city but rather distributed into neighbourhoods across the city.

A garden surrounds the machines and farewell ceremonies take place in the in-between spaces. Basically a 2-day event is devised as farewell gathering among family and friends. The first time people come into the machine building, walking down the spiral ramp accompanying the dead body being transferred and deposited into the machines for working. This is an event called “Deposit”. Visitors witness the safe arrival of the dead body into the machines and they leave via another ramp of the double helix to the garden.

Conventionally we have the idea of witnessing the dead body being buried 6 feet underground as the final moment of goodbye. For a change in this proposal, visitors descend underground following the ramp to ‘walk the last journey with the dead’. And seeing the body being safely deposited they leave to the garden symbolising new life for hope and relief.

The machines take time to work in the following week. Family and friends come back in a week to hold a ceremony at the auditorium level to celebrate the new life ready - the second event. After the ceremony they exit to the dome, surrounded by plenty of plants and trees signified the deceased.

To heal the sorrow we cannot run away from it. We accompany the growth of the plants representing the deceased in our intimate courtyard. Death becomes a part of our life - an everyday reality. Life truly goes on, at ease.