PR-749C Special Topics in Preservation 3

Death and Dying Architectures

This class examines death and dying as a generative horizon for spatial production. It traverses philosophy, psychoanalysis and aesthetics, but always returns to architecture as a witness and participant in planetary finitude, and how we spatialize the experience of human and non-human loss.

The specter of death is not only a philosophical problem but also a spatial one: every building is both a shelter and a shroud, a structure haunted by its own eventual ruination.
Encompassing necropolises, burial sites, rituals, memorials and contemporary architectures of extinction, we will explore how spaces of grief, loss, and afterlife become contested terrains where power, race, gender, queerness and futurity converge. Drawing on feminist, queer and critical race theories, we will interrogate how death has been unequally distributed, racialized, and gendered, and how practices of mourning—whether through architecture, literature, or ritual—are entangled with both oppression and resistance.

Topics will include fear and mortality; as both burden and resource; extinction as an architectural problem; and the speculative futures that emerge when we think of preservation not as freezing time, but as learning how to build with, and through, death.

Class prerequisites: Undergraduate degree in any discipline. Accepting students from GCPE, GAULD and other graduate programs across the institute.