Last Landscapes

The Architecture of the Cemetery in the West

Ken Worpole

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781861891617
• eBook ISBN:
  9781861895394
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Last Landscapes is an exploration of the cult and celebration of death, loss and memory. It traces the history and design of burial places throughout Europe and the USA, ranging from the picturesque tradition of the village churchyard to tightly packed ‘cities of the dead’, such as the Jewish Cemetery in Prague and Père Lachaise in Paris. Other landscapes that feature in this book include the war cemeteries of northern France, Viking burial islands in central Sweden, Etruscan tombs and early Christian catacombs in Italy, the 17th-century Portuguese-Jewish cemetery ‘Beth Haim’ at Ouderkerk in the Netherlands, Forest Lawns in California, Derek Jarman’s garden in Kent and the Stockholm Woodland Cemetery.

It is a fact that architecture ‘began with the tomb’, yet, as Ken Worpole shows us in Last Landscapes, many historic cemeteries have been demolished or abandoned in recent times (notably the case with Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe), and there has been an increasing loss of inscription and memorialization in the modern urban cemetery. Too often cemeteries today are both poorly designed and physically and culturally marginalized. Worse, cremation denies a full architectural response to the mystery and solemnity of death. The author explores how modes of disposal - burial, cremation, inhumation in mausoleums and wall tombs - vary across Europe and North America, according to religious and other cultural influences. And Last Landscapes raises profound questions as to how, in an age of mass cremation, architects and landscape designers might create meaningful structures and settings in the absence of a body, since for most of history the human body itself has provided the fundamental structural scale.

This evocative book also contemplates other forms of memorialization within modern societies, from sculptures to parks, most notably the extraordinary Duisberg Park, set in a former giant steelworks in Germany's Ruhr Valley.

References

INTRODUCTION

1 Lewis Mumford, The City in History (Harmondsworth, 1966), p. 18.

2 This phrase appeared in a review by Peter Stothard (Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 2002) of a biography of the British politician William Whitelaw; Stothard has kindly confirmed in a personal communication that the coinage is his.

3 Cited in Sarah Tarlow, Bereavement and Commemoration: An Archaeology of Mortality (Oxford, 1999), p. 6.

4 See Mario Erasmo, ‘Among the Dead in Ancient Rome’, Mortality, VI/1 (2001), which deals with this morphological aberration.

5 I am aware that James Stevens Curl, whose expertise in historical funerary matters exceeds most others, still insists on ‘mausolea’ as the correct plural form of mausoleum. In this instance, I prefer the vernacular ‘mausoleums’. The New Shorter Oxford Dictionary allows both.

6 James E. Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Memory (New Haven, MA, 1993), p. 3.

7 Christopher Daniell, Death and Burial in Medieval England 1066 – 1550 (London, 1998), p. 109.

8 Clifford Geertz, ‘Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought’, in Local Knowledge (London, 1993), p. 19.

9 James Stevens Curl, The Victorian Celebration of Death (Stroud, 2000), p. 25.

10 James Stevens Curl, ‘Nunhead Cemetery’, private research paper, undated.

11 This citation was most recently cited by Dr Ian Hussein on becoming President of the Institute of Burial and Cremation Administration (IBCA) in 2001. See City of London Cemetery and Crematorium Newsletter, 6 (Winter 2001/2002), p. 8.

12 Edwin Heathcote’s fine book, Monument Builders: Modern Architecture and Death, Chichester, 1999), details some important twentieth-century architectural achievements in former East European countries. Likewise, Folk Art in Hungarian Cemeteries by Corvina Kiadó and Ernö Kunt (Budapest, 1983) offers a rich glimpse of a distinctive aesthetic at work, which ought to be more widely known and investigated.

13 One writer who records an occasional sense of sadness, if not despair, caused by the nature of the subject-matter is Sarah Tarlow in Bereavement and Commemoration. She rightly distinguishes between dealing with the subject in general, which is usually without any deep existential problems, and the very different matter of making a close study of individual epitaphs, inscriptions, personal outpourings of grief on the loss of children and other loved ones. In the case of the last mentioned, she recorded an occasional but nevertheless real challenge to her own emotional well-being.

ONE: LIVING WITH THE DEAD

1 Regina Barreca, ‘Writing as Voodoo’, in Sarah Webster Goodwin and Elizabeth Bronfen, eds, Death and Representation (Baltimore, 1993), p. 174.

2 Cited in Lindsay Prior, The Social Organisation of Death: Medical Discourses and Social Practices in Belfast (London, 1989), p. 111. This is an extraordinarily good book, a closely observed sociological study of all aspects of dying, death and funerary culture in contemporary Northern Ireland.

3 Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude (London, 1996), p. 5.

4 I am indebted to the ideas and suggestions of Richard Hill on many counts, but in this particular instance to his discussion of ‘Aesthetic Experience’ in Chapter 4 of Designs and their Consequences (London, 1999), pp. 87–108.

5 Dr Tony Walter, ‘Ritualising Death in a Consumer Society’, RSA Journal (April 1996), p. 36

6 Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999), especially pp. 177–84.

7 Howard Colvin, Architecture and the After-Life (London, 1991), p. 1.

8 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space (Boston, MA, 1994), p. 88.

9 Hilary Lees, English Churchyard Memorials (Stroud, 2000), p. 20.

10 Brian Bailey, Churchyards of England and Wales (London, 1987), p. 21.

11 Heinrich Härke, ‘Cemeteries as Places of Power’, in Topographies of Power in the Middle Ages, ed. Mayke de Jong and Frans Theuws, with Carine van Rhijn (Leiden, 2001), p. 20.

12 David Charles Sloane, The Last Great Necessity: Cemeteries in American History (Baltimore and London, 1995), p. 14. This excellent book sensitively and carefully delineates the very different attitudes towards death, burial and landscape that emerged in North America, in comparison with Europe, and which even today continue to develop in quite different directions.

13 The ideas of Yi-Fu Tuan are especially important to this book, especially those contained in Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (London, 1977).

14 Christopher Tilley, Metaphor and Material Culture (Oxford, 1999), p. 181.

15 The reference to Malinowski’s views and their implications is suggested by Tony Walter, ‘Sociologists Never Die: British Sociologists and Death’, in David Clark, ed., The Sociology of Death (Oxford, 1993), p. 273.

16 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London, 1984), p. 39.

17 Françoise Dastur, Death: An Essay on Finitude, trans. John Llewelyn (London, 1996), p. 39.

18 W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London, 2001).

19 W. G. Hoskins, The Making of the English Landscape (London, 1977), p. 12.

20 The Newham figure is contained in Burial Space Needs in London (London Planning Advisory Committee, 1997), p. 54. The Boston figure is cited in Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (New York, 1984), p. 219.

21 Phil...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• one Living with the Dead
• two Landscapes and Meanings
• three Death’s Compass
• four Cities of the Dead
• five Libraries in Stone
• six A Walk in the Paradise Gardens
• seven The Disappearing Body
• eight A Place at the End of the Earth
• References
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photographic Acknowledgements
• Index