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For my exhibition, I am exploring how architecture changes the way death is handled and percieved. Early on, death was more normalized than it is today. Death is sanitized and separated into not only a spiritual and symbolic side of how we cope with death, but also the large industrialized business side of death. Society is much more focused on the figurative and representative side of what happens after death, which is easily shown through architecture by masking the actuality of how death is processed. Buildings are built to emphasize and show more of the naturalistic and calming aspects we associate with death, highlighting the grief and healing of the living, rather than the actuality of death associated with the deceased. Buildings are built to conceal the program of what is inside. Crematoriums are often masked to look like they hold nothing other than condolence halls and grieving centers; shoving the assembly line of machines burning the ashes that we conceal in an urn underground.
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The exhibition highlights the changes from dealing with death hands-on, to the new age idea of separating the two instances will be displayed in two different rooms, completing my exhibited experience on how architecture affects death. The first room, dealing with what death used to be like before it was desensitized, leading up to the exposure of the Paris Morgue, brining me to my second room. Splitting the room down the center, the second room exhibits the separation of death at its fullest. Showing examples of the symbolic side of death and how architecture highlights beauty through the use of light, color, materials and emotion. The second side will display the business of death, presenting photographs of what we typically do not see. The clash of the two completely different sides of the room in the end are still presenting the same topic, which is how death is percieved architecturally.
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Senior Thesis Arch 495. Professor Shannon Starkey
Spring 2016
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In the center of the exhibition is an abstract piece, which is designed to help create a clashing of the two separated sides back together again. With the use of flowers, a universal object used to convey death, I attempt to create an explanation of my thesis through symbolic pieces. Typically flowers are presented at funerals, they are what you set on a gravestone, they are what you bring to someone in the hospital who is terminally ill or hurting. Flowers themselves have life, wilt and die. The first set of flowers places in a clear glass, represent life and the beauty that comes with it. The second vase, filled with sand and fake flowers, explains my research of hiding what actually happens when we die. Filling the second vase full of sand is represenation of our body's ashes in an urn after we die, the fake flowers spouting out of the vase resembling and urn is an imitation technique, explaining how the symbolic side of death tries to imitate life. Funerals depend heavily on the deceased presence of when they were living, not the remorse of the deceased as a corpse. Lastly, the last set of flowers, wilted and dead show what happens after we die. Exploitin a dead flower, signifies a dead body. Mixed into the bouquet of dried up flowers, are crafted flowers made out of metal, describing the mechanical side of death that makes up a business that is not hevily talked about. Still filled with sand to remind us of ashes, instead of a vase, I have places this last bouquet in a gas lamp, to highlight the ovens of a crematorium and the process of what happens to almost 50% of bodies after death.
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Senior Thesis Arch 496. Professor Shannon Starkey
Spring 2016
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