WATERFRONT CEMETERY

Contemporary cemeteries of North America have traditionally been sited on the physical and psychological periphery of cities, spatializing our unease with mortality into landscapes of marginality and separateness. From the living city to the dead one, we can see the boundaries that link the two: a fence, a change in landscape, the lightness of the world shifting into a somber and elegiac grey. The planes between them are rarely broken or entwined.

This project proposes a liminal plane, where death and life intersect in transgressive and provocative ways. By transforming the increasingly obsolete car-centric infrastructure of Vancouver’s underground parkades into a cemetery complex, interactions with mourning and the acceptance of mortality can take on a radically civic and social dimension.