Future100: Students Design for Death

With an eye to natural cycles of demise and rebirth, architecture students devise new forms for memorials and new rituals to accompany them. 

By: Audrey Wachs

Death is inevitable. Even so, very few people like to think about, talk about, or plan for it. Architecture students Dario Sabidussi and Yuxuan Xiong, both graduate students at the University of Pennsylvania, are exceptions. Amid the chaos of the COVID-19 pandemic and ecological precarity, they have staked out wildly inventive rituals of remembrance and resilience through architecture. 

For an advanced design studio course in the spring of 2021, Sabidussi and his partner Diego Ramirez challenged common but environmentally disastrous practices like embalming and cremation while designing new spaces of mourning in New York’s Central Park, their chosen site. But they had to address these concerns within the context of the studio’s theme: theater design. 

 “A theater is supposed to be a space of vibrancy and life—you leave feeling full of life; you’re rejuvenated,” Sabidussi explains. “We wanted to give that same respect to the dead. So we created a theater of life and a theater of death, [to] create a new kind of funerary tradition.” 

Every aspect of the team’s Seneca Growth Complex challenges business as usual in the death industry. Visitors remember their loved ones in the subterranean Theater of the Living, while researchers study ecological burial practices underfoot.