It is a human right to decide one's own death, and to pass on to the next phase of life’s journey. History is littered with deeply profound architecture relating to dying and death, but perhaps ecological dispositions are better than philosophical translations?
Embracing climate change, the design weaves life into sunken histories and invites the landscape to participate in transcendental contemplation, offering sensitive spaces in which to reframe the belief in diverse interpretations of reincarnation. The vignettes on the Isle of Thanet adapt old values of Christianity into a new universal faith of atonement towards nature.
The conscientious interventions display delicate and temporal relationships with the existing landscape, a reminder of our transitional existence on Earth. As with karma and the cyclical transmigration of souls in David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas (2004), the first vignette – the reception – is also the final vignette, the crematorium. There is a symbiotic recurrence of time: at every hour when the clock’s bell chimes, a soul is embraced in Heaven.
