Images of Life: A Crematorium on Time and Memory

Abstract

Contemporary life presents a crisis of memory. An increasingly complex globalizing society of exponential growth and change has deeply altered humanity's relationship to its history, abstracting modern culture away from a living connection to memory as things tumble with increasing rapidity into an irretrievable past. No aspect of society more poignantly reflects this discontinuity than the loss of a meaningful position for death within the context of urban life. This thesis examines the role of the poetic image in architecture and film as a means of evoking communal understandings of death and memory that links subjective, phenomenological experience to a deeper collective sense of place and being. Occupying a 25,000 sf site along the ship canal in the Ballard Neighborhood, the Seattle Crematorium aims to provide an experience of catharsis and place of continual return, revealing the potent function of architecture as the stage and setting of collective memory.