Yasemin Parlar
Architectural Design Crossovers
Necropolitan London: Psychogeographies of memory, death and burial pattern in the city
In a fast-moving metropolitan city like London, cemeteries can be regarded as sites that slow down and collect time. They are spaces of another realm that operate between the spatial and the temporal. This project examines the role of the cemetery as a memory space that acts as an interface between different memory-making practices and challenges society’s changing attitudes towards death that, over time, transformed funerary sites from collective public spaces to secluded necropoli.
Considering memory spaces as clusters of various memory units, the proposed project couples two different units of memory, a library and a cemetery. The proposal is situated on the site of the former Bishopsgate Passenger Terminus, which is conceived as a found fragment of urban memory in the dense centre of Shoreditch. The new Terminus provides a physical space within the city for people to share collective memory-making experiences and therefore accommodates funerary practices within everyday rituals.