Vertical Cemetery
Spring 2015 / Fundamentals of Architecture II / Whitney Moon
The program for this project was an urban cemetery and crematorium in Milwaukee, WI using a patterning strategy to organize the spatial arrangements. Considering the future of death, especially death in an urban context where ground space is limited, this approach takes a quantitative stance on death. An in-depth analysis of death totals in Wisconsin showed that burials will eventually become an obsolete method for handling human remains because of the extra resources and space they require.
8,000 people die in Milwaukee County every year. As of 2015, 46% and 48% of the deceased are buried and cremated, respectively. A projection of these statistics suggests that burials will continue to decrease by 15% every ten years; therefore, there will be 38% by 2020, 23% by 2030, and 0% by 2050. Contrary to the burial projection, cremations are expected to increase. 56% of the deceased will opt for cremation by 2020, 71% by 2030, and 100% by 2050. Initially, the burial tower would rapidly grow; however, the drastic shift of how remains are handled in the future would cause the burial tower to cease to grow beyond 25 floors; whereas, the increase in cremations would cause the cremation tower to grow more than 10 times its original height by 2100—exceeding the height of the burial tower.
The analysis inspired the Vertical Cemetery. To accommodate the annual death totals, the Vertical Cemetery would be ever-changing, and its growth over time would ultimately become a physical manifestation of the city’s death totals. The vertical concept could accommodate the burial method while still preserving the precious, dwindling ground space for the living.
The burial tower could accommodate approximately 420 bodies per floor; and the cremation tower could accommodate around 10,0000 bodies per floor. In the burial tower, remains would be stored in caskets which would be sealed in the waffle slab structure. In the cremation tower, remains would be stored in columbariums.
