The Falls
A speculative architectural project completed using Rhinoceros3D and Unreal Engine 5. The project speculates on how people will remember and honour the dead 150 years into the future, through the specific architectural typology of a cemetery.
A cemetery built at the edge of civilization, considered non essential to life, yet of sufficient necessity to be built anyway. The project expands the scope of architectural problems to include these speculative changes in human behavior, programmes and systems, and is a response to future challenges through both physical and digital engagement.
Honouring the Dead
In this world, the dead are honored by returning them back to the sea. The entire process of the wake and funeral takes place on a river through several rooms within the building.
Visitors come and go to the Wake Room for up to three days to pay their respects. The funerary hall, or the Falls, is where the body is taken on its last journey before it falls into the ocean.
Remembrance
The deceased, before their passing, can visit the facility to create their own avatar that reflects their self-impression. Visitors can then interact with the avatar to rekindle memories of their past in the Confluence Room. As each person has formed different impressions with the deceased in their lifetime, their perception of that person would be different, and so would be the holographic projection of the avatar presented to them.
Read on to see my process.
Initial research
Before embarking on developing our world, site, and architecture, I engaged in some extensive research with my studio-mates on speculative futures of our environment, the climate, technology, and funerary practices.
The speculation on technological advancements included a huge array of ranging from the transfer of the human consciousness to a mechanical body, to cryogenics or biological modifications to prolong lifespan. Meanwhile, research on the environmental future presented both an optimistic outcome, with humans successfully mitigating global warming, alongside other world issues such as poverty, and a pessimistic one, akin to the setting in apocalyptic films we see today.
Inspired by my research, I knew I wanted to build my world based on a more pessimistic outlook of the environmental future, with themes of post-apocalypse, drastic income disparity, reestablishment of social norms and structure.
Drawing references from video games such as Death Stranding and movies such as Oblivion depicting post apocalyptic worlds, I created a board of reference images to help determine and guide my project.
My early research extended to reading selected text excerpts related to concepts of simulations, memories, remembrance, etc. Of those, one that particularly struck me was On Memory and Reminiscence by Aristotle.In On Memory and Reminiscence, Aristotle discusses the nature of memory and remembering. The act of remembering or recalling a memory may seem so natural and instinctive to us, yet we do not consider the deeper meanings of what remembering is; why can we remember some things but not others, and why our recollection of the past may differ from what actually happened? What intrigued me the most about this text was Aristotle’s definition and explanation of how one remembers.
Aristotle recognized that the nature of a memory implies elapsed time. We do not remember the future or the present. “Memory relates to the past,” and “to remember the future is not possible… nor is there memory of the present, but only sense perception” (Beare, 2010). Hence, the capability to remember stems from the ability to perceive time, as one cannot have a memory of the past when they don’t distinguish between what has happened and what is happening.
In addition to one perceiving an event as the past, the event must be – as Aristotle stated – presentable. “All objects capable of being presented are immediately and properly objects of memory, while those which necessarily involve presentation are objects of memory incidentally.” (Beare, 2010). Yet presentations of events may differ from facts of the event, and as such, it becomes “clear that we must conceive that which is generated through sense-perception in the sentient soul” (Beare, 2010). Hence, memories form from these different impressions that an event makes on a person. Aristotle likened this “impression of the percept” to an “impression with a seal” (Beare, 2010), and explained that for the same reason the “very young and very old persons are defective in memory” (Beare, 2010).
In relation to our Core Studio, these insights on memories and the deeper investigation into how each person make different impressions on the same events allows us to better understand and craft how visitors can remember their deceased loved ones. When it comes to remembering the dead, perhaps having more personalized experiences tailored to how each person remembers their loved one would be more apt in creating closure.
narrative
Based off my research, I began crafting my narrative as part of the world building process of this project. I wanted to create a bleak, gloomy world that conveyed some subtle sorrow and regret of the past. All that is left in the world is desolation, and funerals and how people honour the dead is a response to the history over the past 150 years. I was also inspired by ceremonial water burial practices, and wanted to work that into my project. The final narrative is as follows:
"The war on climate change was a global one. Yet, it did not take long for humans to turn on each other. Rising sea levels first took Kiribati, a small island nation in the central Pacific Ocean. But people didn’t take it seriously. Then, larger cities started to disappear underwater; New York, Venice, Tokyo were the next to follow. Countries started to run out of space, and war broke out to desperately acquire more habitable land. Entire nations engulfed, millions of lives sacrificed, and the remainder displaced. When the war ended, sovereignties no longer had any meaning. There was only one nation, Earth.
After the mass inundation, land space is disproportionately scarce compared to the amount of people that needs to occupy it. Together with the sea level, what we used to know as the ground level has shifted up into the mountains. City-colonies are built at high altitudes, far from the Oceans, to minimize the risks of flooding again. Habitable land that is still considered safe by the authorities is packed beyond saturation by these cities and prioritised for life-giving or life-supporting infrastructure. Services such as deathcare or recreation which are no longer considered as essential are pushed to the boundaries of the cities.
Climate change will happen with and without us, but human actions play a part in accelerating its effects. We learned from our mistakes and worked sustainability and environmental-conscious methods into all aspects of life and death, including how we dispose of the dead. Funerary rites with high carbon footprint and pollution such as cremation and land burials have been phased out. When sending off the dead, people turn to what is concurrently the progenitor of life and the harbinger of death – the Ocean. The Ocean is the mark of death. As the Ocean claimed the millions of lives when the floods came in, it has become the embodiment of Death in itself. Thus, water burials have become a common practice across all colonies. Water burials also bear no carbon footprint, keeping in line with the established sustainability and carbon-emission standards.
The war may have wreaked chaos, but it also fuelled technological advancements. Artificial intelligence and virtual reality were so developed that it was used to simulate hand-to-hand combat training during the war. Today, we use it to remember the dead. Should one have made the necessary arrangements, a simulation of their consciousness is made after death, giving their loved ones an opportunity to achieve closure. Their body decomposes at the bottom of the Ocean, but the soul continues to live, albeit in digital form."
Initial sketches and drafts of narrative
Alongside the narrative text were two collages that I developed to exhibit the mood and tone of the project.
site development
What followed was the development of the site, specifically a cliff, based on my references and narrative.
In my world, water burials were the only type of funerary ceremonies performed, to honor the dead by returning them to the sea, which the people viewed as the embodiment of Death. Cemeteries where these funerals are held are also pushed towards the boundaries of civilization.
Thus, I modelled my site to be a cliff at the edge of habitable land, facing the vast ocean, well suited to house a cemetery for sending off the dead back to the sea.
concept development
To establish the concept of my cemetery and how its relevant programmes and functions relate to each other, I began a series of diagrams to help me understand the relationship between each space and programme.
Diagrammatic representation of my concept illustrated the flow of circulation, distinguished between different types of visitors or user, such as family and friends of the deceased, the cemetery staff, or revisiting general public.
This facilitated the eventual planning of spaces, its orientation, relative positions, and sizes.
Conceptual, relational & circulation sketches
The diagrams were then developed further, to illustrate properly the concept of my cemetery.
A visitor lift provides access for the general public to the main courtyard, while a separate service lift brings staff, along with the unprepared dead bodies, down to the morgue.
A central courtyard or concourse level serves as the main point of divergence for the circulation when people arrive at the cemetery. From the courtyard, visitors may choose to visit either the memorial services, or the ceremonial ones.
Memorial services involve the Confluence Room and Archive Creation Room. The Confluence Room is where visitors can interact with a projected holographic simulation of the deceased based on their specific memories and experiences with them when they were still alive (more on this later), and the Archive Creation Room is where these simulated holo-projections are developed and stored. These services are available to returning visitors or to those who just attended a wake or funeral.
Meanwhile, ceremonial services include the wake within the Wake Rooms, and the funerary send-off at The Falls. These rooms are reserved for private ceremonies, only open to family members and friends that are invited to attend.
The staff, aside from accessing the aforementioned spaces, also prepare dead bodies for ceremonies in the morgue, and have access to the reservoir of water used throughout the cemetery, as well as the staff room.
2D and 3D concept diagrams
memorial service
The memorial service in the Confluence Room was inspired by Aristotle's On Memory and Reminiscence.
In the text, Aristotle described memories to form from different impressions that an event makes. In other words, the same event may make a different impression on different people based on their age, IQ, and perception, etc.
The deceased would have created an avatar of themselves before they died, developed based on one more more sessions of recording of their personality, life events, tone, vocabulary and body language. This would be their impression of themselves.
Post mortem, visitors who visit reminisce and remember the deceased through their interactions with the avatar, which appears unique to each individual. This triggers different versions of the same memories based on their different impressions made in the deceased's lifetime.
architectural development
Moving forward, I began development of my architecture on the site. The conceptual diagrams that I made gave me a clear guide on the spatial and programmatic organization of my project. On the other hand, I wanted to create wide panoramic views of the vast, relentless ocean, allowing for peaceful and calm contemplation.
The Falls (funeral hall) is the largest volume of the whole cemetery, representing its grand, ceremonious purpose as a last goodbye, sending off the dead into the ocean.
3D and physical architectural models
Elevation and plan drawings
Sources
Beare, J. I. (2010). On memory and reminiscence Aristotle (ca. 350 b.c.). Annals of Neurosciences, 17(2), 87–91. https://doi.org/10.5214/ans.0972-7531.1017208
Special thanks
EVA CASTRO & DARYL HO: For your invaluable guidance, knowledge imparted and support as studio instructors.
sutd asd core studio 2 - the digital archive: "the proto-cemetery" project brief
This studio will operate ‘against’ hyper-contextualism or specific technicisms of sort, challenging preconceived cultural conditions, the “known” and the “appropriate”, to create experimental prototypes whose specificity don’t arise from the regulative condition of a specific place but from the environmental fictions we will design. We will pursue the “generic”; a building type without a specific (existing) site and time. Our context will be understood as the development of a narrative, where we will craft a “culture”, that is a community – and an architecture. We will design hence fictions that will unfold onto physical worlds, turning into environments, where the projects will unfold from, defining the new types and temporalities of the funerary rituals, activating a certain form of truth -our truth, within it.
The building’s temporality will be that of a desired future within a speculative world in 100+ years, one where corpses are no longer kept/stored/mourned in conventional/known ways. Where there may be socio-economic-hygienic and spatial restrictions to the funerary practices we know now.
The “time” in which our buildings will be inscribed should be understood not as mere actuality but as an experimental field where questions are prompted;
Will we be?...as we are now?
How?
Will we exist?... as we are now?
How?
Will we live?...as we do now?
How?
Will we feel?...as we do now?
How?
Will we remember?...as we do now?
and onto where designs could be experimented without the asphyxiating weight of actual parameters. We will embark in the adventure of inventing new configurations, and more specifically, to cater for new building-forms of digital/analogue (co)existence. The design drive will be a program to organize in space and time, in a crafted narrative, a series of interfaces, material or otherwise, between analogue atmospheres and digital environments.
infinite side-scrolling runner
infinite side-scrolling runner
