ROSE COLOR LIGHT FINIS TYLER RAY A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degrees of: Master of Landscape Architecture Master of Urban Planning University of Washington 2016 Committee: Branden Born Jeffrey Hou Kenneth Yocom Programs Authorized to Offer Degrees: Landscape Architecture Urban Design and Planning ©Copyright 2016 ©Finis Copyright Tyler Ray2016 Finis Tyler Ray University of Washington ABSTRACT ROSE COLOR LIGHT FINIS TYLER RAY Co-Chairs of Supervisory Committee: Professor and Department Chair Jeffrey Hou Department of Landscape Architecture Associate Professor Kenneth Yocom Department of Landscape Architecture Spanning man’s socio-cultural evolution across six millennium, human burial has evolved from the core spiritual and ecological belief of pre-dynastic Egyptian culture that the dead nourished the living through agricultural resurgence. From the earliest point in Egyptian history in which economic and political forces began to impress upon the built environment, these forces also began to impress upon the basic spiritual connectedness of life and death. The sacred natural process has eroded to the point that our modern world is so wildly disassociated from death that disposal of modern human remains is largely regarded as inorganic, and the landscapes where we lay our dead are conceptual landfills. Modern culture has been convinced through capitalist greed and political might that the biological return to the earth is unsanitary, and the only proper way to conduct human burial is through impediment of the ecological process, all while maintaining this ritual is antecedent to the modern world and deeply reflective of the spiritual ancient practice. This research and design thesis explores the concept of future urban cemeteries as edible deaths-capes - natural burial cemeteries that function as an edible landscape by using the nutrients from the human decomposition process to nurture the growth of fruits and vegetables – with a reasoning based in the potentially detrimental environmental effects of modern American embalming and burial as born from the ancient Egyptian culture. ROSE COLOR LIGHT ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my thesis supervisory committee, Jeff Hou, Ken Yocom, and Branden Born, for the guidance in writing this thesis. I would like to thank Rebecca Andrews, Kelly Gore, and Nicole Huber for stoking my creativity throughout my academic career, and reminding me that it is okay to live and work in the shadows. 8 Introduction 16 Burial and Embalming is Ancient History 24 Conquest, Catacombs, and Cemeteries 30 Urban Blight / Rural Delight Rome, Paris and the Urban Cemetery The United States, Romanticism, and the Rural Cemetery Movement 38 Dissociation and Commercialization of Death Dissociation from Death Commercialization and the Funeral Home 46 The Rose Colored Chanel Suit Grief Therapy and the Television Physical Corpse/Physical Landscape 58 Man(kind)ifest Destiny 66 You Are What You Eat 78 Fin 80 Bibliography TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION My curiosity of death began at a young age. I grew up on a farm near Memphis, Tennessee, just a few miles from the banks of the mighty Mississippi River; there, our fields are blanketed with cotton bolls, our pasture is filled with cows, and our yard is littered with chickens. The spring when I was four years old, the chickens began to lay eggs. I was familiar with eggs – scrambled with cheese on a fresh biscuit was a breakfast favorite – but this was the first time I understood where eggs came from. My grandparents told my brother and I that if we left the eggs alone and let the chickens sit on their nests, they would hatch into baby chickens. Every day my brother and I would run out to the chicken coop to check and see if there were any babies. Every day we would walk back into the house disappointed. Early one morning, the dew still on the ground, my grandfather took us out to the coop to show us two balls of chirping fluff in the nest among the un-hatched eggs. As the days passed, the number of baby chickens quickly grew from two to ten, and for the couple of weeks following, we kept the babies in the chicken coop until they were large enough to roam the yard. This of course was incentive to lock myself into the coop each day and visit with them. I would sit on the ground in the scattered hay to watch the baby chicks run around and chase each other. My brother and I would take turns picking them up and petting their soft yellow down while the mother hens scratched around in the dust. These baby chicks were my friends. When the chicks were old enough to leave the coop, my brother and I had the job of opening the door each morning to let them run freely. They would spend the days feeding on the chipped corn tossed into the grass, or resting under the shade of the bushes in the flowerbed. As the sun would start to set, we would herd them back into the coop for the night to roost. One evening, when we went to close up the coop for the night, I noticed a familiar feathery lump in the yard. Still. Unmoving. One of my tiny friends was lying limp in the grass. I bolted onto the screened-in porch and bounded into the kitchen to tell my grandparents something was wrong. Being that young, I remember the feeling of sheer devastation, crying uncontrollably. I could not understand why he was not moving like the other chicks, what my grandparents meant when they said he had died. And what it meant to die. What did it mean to be dead? He was gone, never to run around the yard again. And there was no explanation as to why. One of my little friends was gone and never coming back. My grandparents told me that we needed to bury him, and that I should find a place in the flowerbed to dig a hole. They told me that if I buried him by the buttercups, I would always know where he was and I could visit him whenever I wanted - the buttercups would always be there to remind me of him. I used my plastic sand 8 shovel and scraped through the top layer of mulch, then used the corner of the shovel to dig through the hard brown dirt to make a shallow hole. My grandfather placed the fragile body in the ground, and I covered it up with the scattered mix dirt and mulch, still sobbing. I did not understand. For days after burying him, I would walk by the flowers with a casual glance. As the flowers got taller and bloomed, the other baby chicks got bigger and their feathers turned to red. I wondered what was happening under the dirt where he was buried – was he the same size, was he red now too, or was he there at all. A couple of times I took my sand shovel back to the spot and tried to dig him up. I wanted to know. I wanted an answer. The baby chick dying was my first introduction to loss. As a four year old, it was an unfathomable concept that something I loved could stop running and breathing, be covered in dirt, and only be seen again in the visage of a buttercup. However, by growing up on a farm, death soon became a concept that was more understandable – death was an unavoidable part of life. When a cow or horse would die, I would go out to the pasture with my grandfather; we would wrap a chain around its neck or leg and drag the body from the front pasture to the back pasture and put it in “dead pile” – an area behind a hill where all the dead animals would be placed. The animals were too big to be buried, so the only option was to place the dead bodies in a heap. As one after another would die, it would become almost ritualistic to drag the fresh corpse to the dead pile and see the stages of decomposition of the other corpses; the cow we put there a couple of weeks earlier would just be scraps of flesh, a hollow ribcage, and chipped bones. On nights after we would take an animal to the dead pile, I would walk into the dewy grass and listen to the coyotes cackling from the back pasture where they were feeding on flesh. Seeing my dog gnawing on a jawbone or leg bone that she pulled from the dead pile was not only common, but also welcome. She was hungry and there was available food. This was life and death on the farm. One morning when I was nine years old, my mom walked into my room to wake me up. She usually came in with a stern warning to put my feet on the floor and to go take a shower. This morning was different. She came in and woke me up by sitting on my bed. As she looked at me and opened her mouth to speak, she started to cry. Gasped breaths broke her words as she told me that my great-grandmother passed away in her sleep the night before. Memaw was dead. I did not go to school that day. Instead, my mother took my brother and I to buy “funeral clothes;” the following day we were to go to Memaw’s visitation. The visitation was where I would be able to see Memaw one more time to tell her goodbye. By this time, I had grown accustomed to seeing animals after they had passed away, but seeing my Memaw dead was unsettling.