Rather than a physical building, this mosque creates a place of worship in the spaces between buildings whose qibla is formed by skewering the urban grid to “forg[e] a forced perspective view in the direction of Mecca.”
Rather than an impervious (or quasi-impervious) block, it is “seamless with [the] streets, connected directly to the pulse of daily, and open to anyone and everyone at anytime.” At other times, it functions as an outdoor plaza.
“The inside of The Vanishing Mosque is its outside,” writes RUX. “Its community extends to the limits of the city at large, creating a sense of shared ownership, collective identity, and deep roots that connect spiritual life to modern urban living.”
Very briefly, as a postscript to an old post, the New York Times invited several people to comment on roadside memorials, no doubt inspired by the recent public exhalations of supposedly private grief over Michael Jackson's death. The editors asked: “Why do people feel a need to build them? Are they a distraction or a warning? Should restrictions be placed on them?”
As expected, the responses (and the many fascinating comments from readers) are incredibly diverse.
Last week, we read in The New York Times that “Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City here as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.”
As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history.
To be intentionally obvious and understated, the plan is controversial.
There is actually a lighthouse, this one in the Pacific, that has been turned into a columbarium.
Called the Tillamook Rock Lighthouse, it sits on a rugged island just off the coast of Oregon state. From above it looks like a solitary Greek monastery sitting precipitously on a promontory, one of only a few in the Athosian peninsula to escape a future deluge.
And it just might look like an ideal sanctuary to store your remains, a picture-postcard perfect locale where your family and friends might at least enjoy visiting, with a phenomenal view to alleviate their grief.
Except, of course, for a couple of things:
1) Eternity by the Sea Columbarium, the company who owns the lighthouse and who converted it into a cemetery, lost their license in 1999 because of inaccurate record keeping and because their columbarium isn't technically one. The urns, which are supposed to be placed in niches, rest instead on boards and concrete blocks.
When the company tried to get a new license in 2005, their application was rejected. They now spend most of their time and money on lawsuits filed against them.
2) The sea is so treacherous that a helicopter is the only way to reach it — that is, if the owner of the island, the Oregon Coast National Wildlife Refuge Complex, even allows you passage to the lighthouse in the mild weather of spring and summer when seabirds are nesting.
But if you're one who's not looking for a peaceful rest in your unconscious days of being dead; actually prefers the thunderous sound of ocean waves constantly slamming into the rocks; doesn't mind sharing quarters with cormorants and common murres; and is thoroughly amused by the image of Charon as a helicopter pilot ferrying your soul across the Styx on whirring oars, then simply contact the proprietors.
They're still making offers for space. Even if they don't have a license.
However, there are some alternatives, for instance, this flippin'ship.
Known formally as the R/P FLIP, it's a mobile research station used by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography principally to “study how sound waves behave under water,” but during its 40 years of operation it has also collected data on the “way water circulates, how storm waves are formed, how seismic waves move, how heat is exchanged between the ocean and the atmosphere, and the sound made underwater by marine animals.”
You can see it position itself vertically, as well as the crew, refrigerators, stoves and coffee pots adjusting to the changing spatial configuration, in this short video.
The ship is the only one of its kind, but surely hundreds should be built, each one interning the pulverized remains of the dead. Or housing a single occupant. One could be the family mausoleum of a Greek shipping magnate. Thousands. Tens of thousands.
A not-so-little forest of columbaria bobbing about in the future ice-free waters of an auroral Arctic.
Should their ballast decay and the whole vessel sinks to the bottom of the ocean, it will simply be a return to standard practices.
It's about that time of year again, a few weeks before the anniversary of this blog when we go searching for something special to treat ourselves with. For the first anniversary, we ordered a few of these architectural notecards by Andrew Zega & Bernd H. Adams. Last year we looked into getting a weather modification machine, specifically this portable hurricane, before deciding to buy a couple more notecards.
This year, we'll probably just order yet more notecards, although what we really want is this lighthouse, pictured above, which is being auctioned off by the fantastically named U.S. Office of Property Disposals. It's located in Chesapeake Bay about 5 nautical miles from the nearest shore. It has “elements of the Second Empire architectural style,” we read.
When the auction ends, perhaps we'll learn that Zega & Adams gave the winning bid. They plan to remodel it into a chinoiserie pavilion, so that they can reenact some of the wildest garden debaucheries of Marie Antoinette.
Or preferably, we find out that a fan of Arnold Böcklin is the new owner. He wants to convert the building into a columbarium.
In still weather or rougher seas, the dead will metaphorically cross the Styx to their final resting place, which in its former life illuminated and guided the lost but, like them, is now extinguished.
For the most recent issue of Vice Magazine, the mono-appellated Bahag explored a cemetery colonized by thousands of families who have transformed it into a thriving necropolis.
Tucked within the hyper-saturated Philippine capital, Manila, the denizens (opportunistic urban planners, if you will) of this supposedly counter-urban void have augmented it with some of the trappings of urban living: shared public spaces, vernacular customs, an informal service infrastructure, classrooms and even several karaoke bars.
Quoting Bahag:
Some families ended up here almost accidentally. Some inherited the mausoleums that they now live in from their great-grandparents. Others came from the provinces and couldn’t make enough money to live in the big city. In all cases, they’re basically families with nowhere else to go.
The people who live here manage to extract livelihoods from the dead. Teenagers carry coffins for 50 Filipino pesos—about 50 American cents. Children collect scrap metal, plastic, and other garbage to sell. Their fathers are employed to repair and maintain tombs while their mothers maintain the house, which could be the family mausoleum or the mausoleum of their employers. Rent-free shanties are wedged between or on top of crypts.
It's an adaptive reuse carried out at an urban scale, a reflection of economic realities and communal creativity rather than a particular disregard for the dead.
What does one find there in the park? “All that is apparent upon the surface,” writes Bowring, “is an enigmatic formation of small circular holes of unknown depth. Their configuration appears significant, as is the nature of the open cavity below. At night, light shines up from inside this curious cavern, emitting an unearthly glow from within the earth. The constellation of points is even more apparent at this time, an inflected grid, whose very presence appears to announce an absence.”
Bowring again: “The cavern below the pattern of oculi is revealed to be the negative form of a building. The whole negative structure has been cast from an iconic architectural object, Le Corbusier's Villa Savoye, and this cast then inverted and placed into the ground. The holes are the negative space of the pilotis, meeting the ground, from beneath rather than from above. The lost object is suppressed as a subterranean subconscious, the landscape of sadness of the Park of the Lost Object.”
The project is fantastic, beautifully conceived and rendered, thought-provoking. It fails to convince us, however, that the landscape would necessarily be “plunged into grief, for the loss of the object” and would have “no wish to regain happiness” and that the site of absence is an “open wound”, a “melancholy place of loneliness,” as if its continued happiness is dependent upon artifacts. Furthermore, there are others who would consider Architecture justly subsumed by Landscape a cause for a celebratory bacchanalia at the Palms Casino, after which, all will awaken in the full blast of the afternoon sun many, many hours later—groggy, migrained but joyous—to a paradigm shift.
What we can be entirely convinced of is that a Villa Savoye entombed is a truly and supremely hysterical scenario.
But hilarity can immediately revert back to “melancholy weightiness” if one mentions the Crandall Canyon Mine, the site of the most recent major mine disaster in the U.S.
As most American viewers are well aware, six workers were trapped at the Utah mine after a coal mine bump. During the rescue operations, holes were drilled from the surface into chambers where the miners may have sought refuge. Atmospheric sensors, microphones and cameras were then lowered to check for signs of the men, but unfortunately, none were detected. Except for the relentless drip of hydrology and phantom sounds of speculated conversations, not much was heard.
All that was recorded and shown during live news conferences was the negative cast of a generic architecture--walls, ceilings, floors, space, anti-gravity supports--embedded in geology, disintegrating, metamorphosing into its own burial chamber and, as was increasingly feared then and very much likely now, into the subterranean tombs of the miners.
And to quote one official from the mine: “There was zero void.”
Also shown during the televised news conferences were maps of the mine, showing its passageways, compartments, entryways and exits. And marked on the pages are the locations of the seven boreholes.
If you were to tell us that the maps might just as well be the architectural plans of the Villa Savoye or the combined plans of every pharaonic tombs in the Valleys of the Kings and Queens, you would be correct. Because they are.
And if you were to tell us that the marked boreholes remind you of Bowring's oculi, the surface presence of untraceable “subterranean subconscious” folding back into the earth, that's because Bowring is a genius and she intended it.
The Crandall Canyon Mine as Park of the Lost Object v2.0.
One wonders if Bowring is an avid spelunker, scheming to embedded, say, St. Peter's or Guggenheim Bilbao, upside down and counter-axial, inside New Zealand's Southern Alps, where she'll rappel until she can't rappel no more.
Parked right now till 28 October 2007 at the Doris C. Freeman Plaza in Central Park is Damián Ortega's Obelisco Transportable, a 20-foot-tall “'mobile landmark' that one could potentially move anywhere to commemorate anything.”
Is is “a nod to the ways in which public sculptures and monuments have historically been moved from one city to another. Ortega describes this as the 'Napoleonic gesture,' in which the wartime victor plunders the monuments of captured cities and brings them back home to be installed in public there as a symbol of victory. Such transfers were meant to signal the rise of a new power and the demise of an older one, as well as an exchange of central and peripheral positions. Cleopatra's Needle in Central Park, for example, was originally created in Heliopolis, the ancient Egyptian city, more than 3,000 years ago. During the time of the Roman Empire, it was moved to Alexandria, where it remained for almost two millennia before being offered to the United States as a gift in the 19th century.”
We can't help here suggesting that Ortega should give Ikea permission to mass produce and sell his reusable memorials, because, firstly, we like to imagine them multiplying exponentially in public spaces everywhere (and no, there is still not nearly enough memorials), and, secondly, we also like the image of people scouring the city—a sort of pre-funerary cortege mixed in with some urban sightseeing—for an abandoned obelisk, one commemorating something already forgotten in the collective memory and thus can now be reused.
Other scenarios abound. For instance, one day of the year, those obelisks-on-wheels commemorating soldiers killed in the Global War on Terror are paraded through the city, like an Easter Procession. Before they are returned to their original sites, they would all be collected in the a central plaza, a formation reminiscent of Eisenman's Memorial to the Murdered Jews in Europe. Alternatively, they could be arranged less formally, more crowded, as haphazard as a favela. In any case, the sight of it all would be quite dramatic, a powerful statement on the consequences of war.
Another day might be set aside for victims of natural disasters and another for bicyclists killed by lunatic motorists.
Roadside memorials will similarly be made mobile, traveling the same route which the unfortunate souls they're memorializing may have taken. (Or seeking revenge?) But then they themselves will be involved in an accident.
That cemeteries can be a place other than for eternal rest, mourning, and the occasional architecture tour is not unheard of, but the list of activities seem to be growing ever more varied and outlandish.
“Historic cemeteries, desperate for money to pay for badly needed restorations, are reaching out to the public in ever more unusual ways, with dog parades, bird-watching lectures, Sunday jazz concerts, brunches with star chefs, Halloween parties in the crematory and even a nudie calendar,” reports the New York Times.
Moreover, at Philadelphia's Laurel Hill Cemetery where six Titanic victims are buried, tourists can dine on a “nine-course re-creation of the last supper aboard [the] ill-fated ocean liner.” Oakwood Cemetery, which previously hosted a medieval-style wedding, will have a Renaissance fair this summer, complete with jousting tournaments. And recently at the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, “a 70-piece marching band serenaded the grave of John Philip Sousa, and dog owners held a parade for dogs dressed as historical cemetery personages, including a Union soldier.”
So if cities ever want to reactivate dead urban spaces, they need only put some dead bodies there, preferably of famous people, and in mausoleums designed by Rem Koolhaas and Ken Smith.
There was a very interesting article a couple of days ago in The New York Times concerning the current construction boom altering the landscape of Mecca.
In addition to the ongoing projects to improve the city's pilgrimage infrastructure, the article tells us that “an entire mountain is being flattened to make way for a huge hotel and high-rise complex. And elsewhere, cranes dot the skyline with up to 130 new high-rise towers planned for the area.”
Quite a few more cranes are to be found in another multi-billion dollar complex, the Abraj al Bait, under construction just across from the Kaaba. The tallest of its towers, a hotel, is projected to be the seventh highest in the world and will loom high over Islam's holiest site.
Perhaps in keeping with the city's historical status as a major commercial center, a mall recently opened as part of the same development. This mall, we read, is “outfitted with flat-panel monitors with advertisements and announcements, neon lights, an amusement park ride, fast-food restaurants and a lingerie shop.” And Cartier, Tiffany, H&M, Topshop and, of course, Starbucks.
Not surprisingly, some feel that “Mecca is becoming like Las Vegas.”
Quoting the article:
Progress has exacted a heavy price in Mecca. More pilgrims than ever can come here, thanks to billions spent on tunnels and infrastructure to accommodate them. But in exchange, the city’s once famed night market, where pilgrims brought their wares to sell, is gone. The Meccan homes and buildings that filled the area near the mosque were demolished in the 1970s to enlarge the mosque. The neighborhoods and families who lived near the mosque and welcomed pilgrims have long since moved away.
And again (with apologies):
Dr. Ahmed of London has cataloged the destruction of more than 300 separate antiquity sites, including cemeteries and mosques. He says the house where the Prophet Muhammad lived was razed and today a dilapidated library, with its windows and doors shuttered, stands in its place.
Or, to mutilate Clifford Geertz: nothing changes or alters like the unconditionally and unalterably sacred.
Going through an archive of half-forgotten bookmarks, we discovered this FORGEMIND.archi.mediaarticle on Enric Miralles and Carme Pinós' Igualada Cemetery located near Barcelona, Spain.
You'll read something about “time architecture” and about life journeys and about space-time-metaphysical continuum and about layering of memories and such. But you'll be forgiven if you skip the whole text and simply peruse the photos, which are many, capture perfectly the essence of the site, and unequivocally support what we've long suspected: that the Igualada Cemetery could be a model for an entirely new flood control system, one that is part levee, part diversionary canal, part city of the dead.
The authors may suspect this as well: “The project is conceived,” they write, “as an earthwork that transforms the surrounding landscape and also as a metaphor for the river of life. A processional route descends from the entrance, where crossed, rusting steel poles which double as gates, proclaim the start of the journey along a winding path where railway sleepers are set into the concrete surface towards the burial area. The route is lined with repeatable concrete loculi forming retaining walls.”
A landscape of concretized rigidity and suppleness, of permanence and impermanence, protecting the living from surging waters, avalanches and supersonic pyroclastic mud flows while welcoming those it could not save.
Nannette Jackowski and Ricardo O. C. de Ostos, both recently tasked to author the next installment of Pamphlet Architecture, once proposed “a gigantic presence of a hanging funeral structure” that will hover above the war torn streets of Baghdad, floating unceasingly “from bright explosive mornings to airless night hours,” and lush with growth from an endless supply of dead Iraqis.
“Day by day, nearly hourly, it updates its assimilating heavy stocks, a statistic of a hundred thousand Iraqi corpses or maybe twenty five thousand.”
Lest someone say that this can never be built, a prototype already exists in the skies above Iraq. To see it, one only needs to track the endless flights of cargo planes delivering dead coalition soldiers back to their home countries. And also the countless parabolic airborne tracings of the injured getting airlifted from battlefields to waiting “cash” units; of celebrities and politicians for Thanksgiving or dubious fact-finding missions; and of celebrity journalists, some of whom will simply add to the spectacle and cause their audience to see the events they cover “as nothing more than a special effect or just another reality TV show” before they get seriously injured and are then swiftly flown away.
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.”
And then to Gallica, from where you can download the following images of Etienne-Louis Boullée's designs for tombs and memorials.
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.
