Mortality defines both architecture and human experience. Throughout time, funerary structures have been designed across societies and civilizations to ground personal and shared beliefs. The idea of the afterlife shapes how these buildings are made, from symbolic monuments to vast tombs and crypts. Now a new range of modern architecture has been designed for remembrance and reflection.
ArkxSite has announced the winners of its international architecture ideas competition.The competition has invited all architecture students and young architects to develop innovative ideas for the design of a Site Mausoleum located in the Jaspe Quarry, ‘Serra da Arrábida’, Portugal. The site is of great natural power as the remains of an old quarry are carved into its landscape, along with massive cliffs that drop dramatically into the Atlantic Ocean.
The competition committee wanted participants to develop an intervention that emphasizes, respects, and celebrates the site, all while providing visitors with a unique experience of movement between enclosed and open spaces.
The relationship between immortality and architecture is ancient one. Writing in The New Yorker, Alexandra Lange discusses the past and future of cemetery design in relation to a new exhibition on display in New York. Featuring a selection of 1300 individual mausoleum designs stored in Columbia University's archives, Lange notes how "patrons weren’t picky about originality. In the late nineteenth century, memorial companies might just bring back a shipment of angels from Carrara to be distributed among future clients." These "rural estates in miniature" eventually gave way to more contemporary designs which dabbled in Realism and Cubism. What will the people of today house their remains in? For Lange, "the design we take personal pleasure from everyday is now less likely to be architecture and more likely to be an interface." Read the article in full here.
Since the remains of Richard III were discovered beneath a car-park near Leicester Cathedral last year, the local church has been left with a perplexing question: what to do with him now? The King's remains are an important part of English history, and an important tourist attraction, but how should they mark his final resting place?
In response to this issue, Cathedral authorities have launched a design competition asking selected architects to submit ideas for a new tomb for King Richard that will be located in the Gothic Cathedral. The brief is an unusually delicate one; the architects submissions will have to consider appropriate symbolism and practicality in their design, not to mention the challenge of designing, in a modern age, the grave of someone who lived centuries ago. They also need to be mindful of the controversy surrounding the King, as the brief states: "Richard demonstrated both the honorable and dishonorable characteristics of human beings." Some consider him a great English King, while others, a bloodthirsty tyrant.
Read more about the brief and see an early submission after break...
