Necropolis reborn: The Cemetery of Contradiction

Abstract

With modern approaches to the memorialisation of death becoming detached from both society and the city, the cemetery has been diminished, both in design and atmospheric resonance. As a result, the significance of the urban environment has suffered along with it. By breaking the trend to push cemeteries further to the city periphery, and re-establish them back in the urban setting, this thesis aims to re-engage the living and the dead. The design of a new cemetery in Christchurch presents an opportunity to re-evaluate the ways in which contemporary society commemorates the dead while simultaneously contemplating their mortality. Architecture has the potential to establish a contemporary shift in the environment in which the dead are memorialised, creating a new necropolis amongst the current metropolis. This thesis is a provocation. It proposes that the city and its residents can benefi t from having, and celebrating, a physical manifestation of the dead within the urban domain. At a macro level there is the intention to re-urbanise and centralise the place of the dead. At a micro level, the place of the dead is to be architecturalised to provoke a more meaningful spatial interaction for the individual and the collective, with the dead residents of the city. While there are urban and landscape design considerations within this thesis, the main focus is on the architectural possibilities of a contemporary urban place for the dead. Tensions and contradictions that latently exist within the cemetery are highlighted and formally explored through the design process. These include exploring the idea of formal absence and presence, looking at how the ground plane is a mediator between what anthropologists term ‘life space’ and ‘burial space’, and investigating the nature of history and memory in a site that simultaneously looks back and projects forward. Combined, these elements endeavour to provide a framework in which society members understand their individual mortality, and as a result, a collective existence