Rose Color Light

Abstract

Spanning man’s socio-cultural evolution across six millennium, human burial has evolved from the core spiritual and ecological belief of Pre-Dynastic Egyptian culture that the dead nourished the living through agricultural resurgence. From the earliest point in Egyptian history in which economic and political forces began to impress upon the built environment, these forces also began to impress upon the basic spiritual connectivity of life and death. The sacred natural process has eroded to the point that our modern world is so wildly disassociated from death that disposal of modern human remains is largely regarded as inorganic, and the landscapes where we lay our dead are conceptual landfills. Modern culture has been convinced through capitalist greed and political might that the biological return to the earth is unsanitary, and the only proper way to conduct human burial is through impediment of the ecological process, all while maintaining this ritual is antecedent to the modern world and deeply reflective of the spiritual ancient practice. This research and design thesis explores the concept of future urban cemeteries as edible deathscapes - natural burial cemeteries that function as an edible landscape by using the nutrients from the human decomposition process to nurture the growth of fruits and vegetables – with a reasoning based in the potentially detrimental environmental effects of modern American embalming and burial as born from the ancient Egyptian culture.