It's Their Funeral

Abstract

Carefully dug graves have shown that even Neanderthals and Homo-Sapiens have buried their dead, indicating a spatial response to death since the dawn of the rational mind. In the “post-modern” age of funeral services, society appears to exhibit a disconnection from spatial rituals of transition and remembrance. This thesis is working toward an understanding of the socio-affective relationships between funerary ritual and the associated spaces and landscapes. Grief obliterates the dailiness of life through accomplishing the end of a relationship; and so, funerary architecture must seek the utility to positively transform through the emotions and psychology of grief, rather than increase the adverse intensity by forcing mourners to move on without closure.