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Glasgow Death Compendium

Part 2 Project 2007
Paul Taylor
Mackintosh School of Architecture | UK
A place is conceived about the dead, but for the living: the burying, cremation and remembering of a loved one. Because life without that person will never be the same again, the route of the ritual is continuous and eternally different.

The programme seeks to create a place where life and death convene, and it is at this point where Glasgow's two rivers, [Kelvin and Clyde], meet that is the site. Now a hinterland, edges at this territory point towards their industrial heritage: [dock, graving dock,quay]

Built form manifests itself as a protective cabinet of brick encasing the identified elements of death.



A permanent dwelling for the dead sitting at the confluence of the Kelvin and the Clyde exploiting the cemetery as parkland and the dwelling and the crematoria as the wall to that park.

Brick is used as the timeless material, simple and unpretentious yet modelled into a monument by manipulation at the scale of man’s hand.

Water, Sky, Fire and Earth coming together in a crafted form, celebrating and grieving in perpetuity for the temporariness of life.

Architecture as an attempt to raise the spirits of the living.

2007
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