lifestyle leader

(Image by BIG.)

It seems like everywhere you turn this week you hit something BIG, either their ski mountain incinerator plant or their pyramid condo. We though we'd join in all the drive-by copy-pasting fun with a favorite project: their design proposal for a crematorium in the famed Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, Sweden.


(Burning in the woods. Image by BIG.)

“The new crematorium,” they write, “will be located in a small clearing within the piece of untouched forest.” This clearing can be reached via 3 paths: “two for the pedestrian that cross each other in the clearing, and one for vehicles to reach the clearing and return. At this intersection we imagine the new crematorium as a clearing in the forest rather than a built object. The two intersecting paths carve through the soil of the undergrowth descending slowly while opening the ground up to the light and the air of the skies above.”


(Image by BIG.)

As a counter proposal, instead of this high energy funeral rite, how about a forest version of a Zoroastrian Tower of Silence or a Tibetan sky burial? Low energy but still utra rapid atomization.

A Treehouse of Silence? A canopy burial?


(A treehouse hotel, called the Mirrorcube, by Tham & Videgård Architects. Image courtesy of the architects.)