The Cenotaph Machine

Contour Crafting

To cap our unintended series of posts on sacred landscapes, let us point you first to contour crafting, a fabrication technology being developed by Behrokh Khoshnevis whereby “a single house or a colony of houses, each with possibly a different design, may be automatically constructed in a single run, embedded in each house all the conduits for electrical, plumbing and air-conditioning.”

Contour Crafting

And then to Gallica, from where you can download the following images of Etienne-Louis Boullée's designs for tombs and memorials.

Etienne-Louis Boullée

Etienne-Louis Boullée

Etienne-Louis Boullée

It's rather unfortunate that Khoshnevis and Boullée did not live in same century. What beautiful collaborations they might have had.

And everyone could easily have ordered cheap Pharaonic mausoleums towering over cities and landscapes. Entire provinces or states or even whole nations becoming literally valleys of the dead, hosting hundreds of encapsulated monumental voids.


The Enigmatic Jean-Jacques Lequeu
The Jardinator©


Grand Canyon: The Creationist Tour
Urinating at the Eisenman
The American Lawn Masjid
Trail of Tears
Reconfiguring the Jamarat Bridge
Cemeteries as Major Disaster Response Protocol
The Kumbh Mela Array