The silenced death

Contemporary funeral architecture

Abstract

It can be said that death is the only certainty with which the human being counts, nothing is more inevitable and universal: from the moment of our birth we are inescapably destined to stop being, therefore, reflecting on this is not rather than face perhaps the only true.
It is the current architectural consequences derived from the above that raises this communication. From the perspective of today's materialistic and desacralized society, which has lost the close relationship that architecture has always maintained with death. Do not forget that most of the monuments of antiquity that have been preserved so far are of a funerary nature. However, nowadays the funeral spaces are heading towards indifference and towards abandonment, a result of the fact that nowadays not only death is concealed and silenced, but it has become the new social taboo.
A feature of the twentieth century, especially from the second decade, is the lack of interest on the part of the architects, towards the cemetery and towards the graves, understood the first as sacred space and funeral place par excellence and the second as tangible evidence of human death The Modern Movement contributed to the expressed, focusing its interest on housing and the "city of the living", considering the architecture of death as a matter of minor importance, typical of previous centuries.
This communication aims to rescue from oblivion and make a brief review of the most significant examples, the exceptions, of this architecture, showing examples of Asplund, Aalto, Scarpa, Rossi, Portela, Mirallés or Chipperfield. At the same time, a reflection on the future of these spaces of death and memory is proposed.