Kafka's Anubim: Death, Anxiety and Architecture

Abstract

Terror management theory asserts that Western society is built upon a deep anxiety of death. This anxiety is manifest in a hero system that encourages the building of legacy. Legacy allows us to transcend our bodies and preserve our identity. This propensity for legacy contradicts the indelible fact that we are dying bodies. Architecture is a crystallization of death denial, attempting to surmount mortality through the conservation of cultural symbolic identity in built form. This thesis interrogates strategies for the inclusion of death anxiety in architecture.

Mining the architecture of Franz Kafka’s narratives, strategies for an architecture of anxiety are extracted. These strategies are speculated upon through a designed intervention in Pukenamu Queen’s Park in Whanganui entitled ‘Kafka’s Anubuim’. The intervention is an architectural parkscape that facilitates the apprehension of death anxiety. The Anubuim leverages the site’s historical role as an epicentre of annihilation anxiety to subvert its pervasive legacy. This legacy resides with the monumentality of its existing architecture.

This thesis resists legacy and argues for the importance of alternate architectural strategies for engaging with mortality, poignant in the centenary year of World War One. It seeks to address death anxiety spaitially as an emerging symptomatic condition of modernity. It posits that continual fluctuation between the familiar and the uncanny may erode architecture as a psychological anchor for legacy.