THE/07

Between grief and play: New urban spaces dedicated to death

Isabel Lasala

Studio Description

This Studio is concerned with the future of the cemetery. Cemeteries are places where some of the most intense human emotions emerge. However, they also undergo a slow but sustained process of abandonment, a sort of urban space slow death. After some time, some cemeteries end up surrounded by indifferent urban conditions, resulting in dead landscapes facing market pressures for being in prime locations.

In this context, you will design interventions in a cemetery at perpetuity that can activate and connect it with its vicinity. You will creatively address the passing of time and merge the seemingly incompatible activities of death and play to explore the production of a new spatial and programmatic continuum, which contributes to creating a new public space category that is increasingly necessary in a rapidly changing urban world.

You will test these ideas on a real site, employing ‘generative practice’ techniques, which merge architecture and landscape architecture into a new hybrid condition where building, site, and topography fully integrate.

Studio Outcomes

The studio seeks to develop a hybrid project that integrates architecture and landscape architecture in a challenging scenario requiring simultaneous resolution of different components at multiple scales. You will analyse three cemeteries at perpetuity (Preston, Burwood and Northcote) and select one to make a speculative intervention that aims to activate the area and connect it with the surroundings.

This process will be undertaken using three complementary methods: observation of the site and its surroundings, case study methodology, and design exploration. You will need to communicate your project through a range of different media, including physical models, sketches, diagrams, sections, plans, axonometrics, conceptual photomontages, linear views and renderings.

Studio Leader

Isabel Lasala is an architect and academic based in Melbourne, Australia. She is one of the Directors of Lasala & Lasala Design Studio, an award-winning practice with more than twenty years of experience. Her practice-based research is focused on the possibilities emerging at the intersection of architecture and landscape architecture. Currently, Isabel is a PhD candidate at RMIT examining cemetery futures, proposing the design of spaces where the seemingly incompatible activities of grief and play can coexist. Isabel's work has been published in academic journals like Interstices (forthcoming), Trazos and IPO. In 2014, Ediciones FAU/UCV published her book Creating Places: Exalting and Overcoming the Architectural Object in the Work of Pablo Lasala. Isabel has a comprehensive teaching record in design studios in the schools of Design, Architecture and Landscape Architecture. In Australia, she has taught design studios at Melbourne University, Monash University, RMIT, UNSW, and University of Technology Sydney.

Readings & References

Andersen, B 2003, Alvar Aalto and Jorn Utzon: An Architecture of Ancient Gathering Forms, University of Aalborg, Aalborg.

Burns, C & Kah, A 2005, Site Matters: Design Concepts, Stories, and Strategies, Routledge, New York.

Carr, S, Francis, M, Rivlin, L & Stone, A 1992, Public Space. Environment and Behaviour, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Corner, J (ed.), 1999, Recovering Landscape: essays in contemporary landscape architecture, Princeton Architectural Press, New York.

Cosgrove, D 1999, Mappings, Reaktion Books, London.

Galofaro, L 2002, Artscapes El arte como aproximación al paisaje contemporáneo, Gustavo Gili

(Land&ScapeSeries), Barcelona.

Grainger, H 2006, Death redesign, British crematoria: History, architecture and landscape, Spire books limited, London.

Leatherbarrow, D 2004, Topographical Stories. Edited by John Dixon Hunt, Penn Studies in Landscape Architecture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Gehl, J 2001, Life between buildings: using public space, Island Press, Washington DC.

Gehl, J 2013, How to study public life?, Island Press, Washington DC.

Pallasmaa, J 2012, The eyes of the skin. Architecture and the senses, John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.

Pallasmaa, J 2012, The thinking hand. Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture, AD John Wiley & Sons, Chichester, UK.

Petschek, P 2008, Grading for landscape architects and architects, Birkhauser, Basel - Boston – Berlín.

Ruby, I & A 2006, Groundscapes The rediscovery of the ground in contemporary architecture, Gustavo Gili (Land&ScapeSeries), Barcelona.

Valentijn, V, Verhoeven 2018, K, Goodbye Architecture The Architecture of Crematoria in Europe, nai010 publishers, Amsterdam.

Worpole, K 2003, Last Landscapes The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West, Reaktion books, London.

Schedule:
Tuesday 9:00am-1:00pm in MSD 237
&
Friday 12:00pm-2:00pm in MSD 237

Contact Handbook