Mixed use?!

This is awesome - derelict houseboat, tied up for years, gradually falling into disrepair, so the owners gradually spread to an old camper van, adding to it as they gradually move in... finally, this starts to succumb to the weather, time, moisture, use... and they expand more, connecting to the boatshed and industrial containers behind... amazing way to live, like a grotty, decomposing time line.

oh yes, and a guest appearance from my mum and my dog (having a crap...)

Goonhilly

Goonhilly

Goonhilly Earth Station

Goonhilly high plateau near the Lizard in Cornwall. Slightly offset to the right of centre is the Earth Station, currently a defunct BT communications base, falling into disrepair. Originally the base was one of the linked radar network sites during the Second World War, then it became related to satellite telecomms in the Cold War and finally civilian telecomms with BT... it was the largest satellite uplink in the world, received the pictures of the Moon landings from the Apollo spaceship.

Architecture of Death. Part II

There's this veil of mysticism about death, it scares the crap out of people and we try not toreally think about it. So we have our various beliefs and stories about it, and they distance it from our real day to day lives. But there is this big industry, factory process to deal with it, and there are a lot of people who do deal with it everyday. Its probably a bit of a brutal analogy, but its a bit like people who work in the food industry - you just want to have your chicken or steak turn up sealed in a little plastic tray in the supermarket, you don't really want to have to think about the bolt-gun-between-the-eyes/rolling-onto-wet-concrete-floor/slashed-throat-open/blood-drained/gutted/fire-blazed/skinned/sawn/chopped-up horror that got it there, all nice and sanitary in its uniform plastic tray - but for a lot of people its just a job, working in a factory, which is what most abattoirs are.

The crematorium is probably about as popular as having an open cast mine or a paedophile safehouse-treatment centre located in your neighbourhood. But they are, by their nature, sympathetic to the local vernacular, designed to look at least, gentle, non-offensive and calm. No one tried to create a Po-Mo crematorium aesthetic experiment. The brief is strictly conformist to limit the distress to the mourners.

Form follows function to a certain extent, and the design has to incorporate a large plant room, where the cremator and associated equipment and machinery are housed. This needs to be large and give access to the fairly complicated equipment, so its often large, airy and warehouse like, with, necessarily, a concrete floor. The public do NOT go into this room. This room would definitely remove the veil of mystery.

Aside from various adjacent office/storage/reception rooms, the building is axial, with a catafalque outside the cremator room, and a larger, main space beyond that, in which the service is held. This room, beyond the initial entrance hall way is basically, as far as the mourners go. The building is axial for the processional purpose of the coffin, entering through the aisle, between seated mourners, into the catafalque and on, through the closed doors into the beyond, the next life, or whatever you choose to believe (but actually, into the big warehouse room at the end unfortunately).

It is a secular building, without fixed religious ornament - the company has a business to run, so it can't exclude a 'market' by fixing itself to just one religious denomination. So the ephemeral, transcendental aesthetic experience is difficult to achieve without making it look too much like a church. But high pitched ceilings recall cathedrals, in a slight way (and conveniently follow the roof pitch line from the warehouse-cremator room at the back). A single pitched roof line may make a large building look a bit too much like a shed, so it is not too much difficult to slightly raise the pitch over the vestry, but the essential line is one long contiguous roof pitch. This is cheap and effect and has been used on countless industrial buildings, and is very effective for space and cost.

Filtered sun light from high windows sends shafts of light through the vestry, on to the seated congregation.

Clad in local stone and decorated internally with a homogeneous off-white stucco, a slate roof maybe, it masks the simple concrete block-work construction and steel i-beams of modern building, which would de-mystify the event and bring the harsh reality to the grieving mourners eyes.

Finally, the plan of the site, the landscaping. This is one of the most important bits of the whole experience, and key to the company's strategy of 'brand loyalty'. They do, effectively, want you to come back.

People have arrived in the carpark, disembarked and made there way in small groups along paths to the front of the building, a portico with a separate road arriving at it, along which the hearse arrives, and disgorges the coffin, under the cover of the overhanging portico.

Unfortunately, this arrangement, from an architectural point of view, with a carpark supporting a main building, and an additional circular access road for dropping off the body, is almost identical to how a MacDonald's Drive-Thru works, with a few more trees and bushes scattered around. And it is necessary, it is efficient. Hopefully, the hearses won't arrive too fast though, or you will have a traffic jam.

The congregation sit, and often the coffin is carried up the aisle (or wheeled), and sits on a plinth at the far end of the vestry - it will go through into the catafalque, then they close the doors to the vestry, to hide the view when they open the doors to the cremator room.

When you go through the service and the coffin is in front of you, and the taboo of death is being confronted by the congregation, everyone is sad and uncomfortable, and obviously feels awful. This is not a good feeling to have - from a commercial point of view at least, and they certainly would not want you to just leave on that note. But when the coffin is removed and the service finishes, everyone filters out into a 'Garden of Contemplation' (not Prayer, obviously). This is a release from the strictures of the service. Fresh air, a beautiful garden, possibly a small pondy/lake thing, probably some flowing water somewhere, and a good view (plenty of open sky) and a chance to stretch the legs. This emphasises the fact that what is done is done, you are back in the real world and life goes on, and the whoever you have left hopefully had a good life - also, it is not YOU who has just been left inside the building behind.

Conveniently, the Exit signs are located in the direction of the congregation's general drift, like when you leave a ride at a theme park, just as the next batch are getting out of their cars and drifting, in small huddled groups, to the signs for Entrance...

Architecture of Death. Part I

Ok, I might be slightly glamourizing the title, a bit... what I'm actually talking about, is the process of what happens when you die..

where do you go?

Sorry, I can't help the melodrama. I don't mean, "do you go up to a big bright light in the sky", I mean, where does the hunk of meat that used to be you... go? The second half of this summer has been a strange one, and while I haven't been to any funerals, I've spent more time in hospitals, elderly care homes and so on, than I have ever done before and it's put the whole idea of getting old, going a bit mad, and finally passing on at the front of my brain.

Death is surrounded by such mysticism, such taboo, that we very rarely talk about it - I even felt a bit sacriligeous, a bit offensive saying that you get old, go mad, and then you die... Seeing my old Gran in the 'home'/waiting room, its an unspoken thought that goes around all heads in the family. What happens when... what do we do about...

So in our minds we have a huge mental block, a stigma of death - completely understandably. But there are a lot of us around... and so a lot of death going on, a lot of the time. The biggest of individual events has no special significance to the civil authorities, regardless of how much respect and sympathy they are ordered to have. They have a job to do. When you die, a process starts.

Say the average life expectancy is 75 years. Thats 900 months. 27375 days! Does that sound a little or a lot to you? You might get a few more years than that, hopefully you won't get less. But (and this maths has some holes in it I know, but I can't be bothered to research the death rate) if we've got a population of 58million, then your 'last day' is going to happen to over 2000 people per day. That's a lot of meat. 154 tonnes of dead humans A DAY to be brutal, in the UK alone.

You can't be kept around too long, or you'll start to smell, and they have a rule book about Health and Safety, and preventing diseases. So you have to be disposed of fairly soon. Its a Harsh Reality.

When you look at the figures you realise how big a physical job this all is... burial, cremation etc etc. And you start to realise that it MUST be a horribly organised, factory-like process. The individual story of each person disappears into the production line. Health and Safety rules apply - rather than being carried by 6 sombre pall bearers, you're wheeled on a stainless steel trolley. Trolley? Can't be any steps then, and one of your mourners might be in a wheelchair, so you glide along on automated ball bearings.

You're being cremated... most people are. You have to be a pretty committed religious addict these days to be buried. And so, you are outsourced to the local crematorium, owned by Death Corp, a multi-armed multi national, more likely to be called Memoria Inc, or Elysium Ltd... They own 200 hundred crematoria across the country, and have a bulk gas contract with Shell's LPG department to maximise profits. They're hedged against future price rises from North Sea gas to lock in future profits...

And environmental rules and targets apply to everyone, especially civil buildings. So in crematoria now, they have HEAT RECLAMATION... I will not explain, but wonder where the warm glow from the underfloor heating is coming from during the service? (This, unsurprisingly, doesn't happen in Germany...) Teaching them how to be efficient for once, but that might be pricking their collective memory a little too far. It keeps costs down, you only need one heating system and ticks lot of green boxes when you go into planning...

Then there is the form of the building itself.