The Architecture of Death — MONTGOMERY STUDIOS

The Architecture of Death:

Sites of Remembrance

The Architecture of Death: Sites of Remembrance is a long-term research project examining burial, mourning, memorial practice, land use, sustainability, and the spatial cultures of grief. Emerging from Rachel Paupeck’s engagement with meditation, embodied awareness, and Buddhist practices of compassion, the work asks how spaces of mourning might engage death spatially, materially, and collectively rather than avoid it.

The research began with studies of Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, moving from documentation toward translation, and from inscription toward light. These studies informed Birch Grove, a burial proposal inspired by Robert Frost’s poem “Birches,” in which cremated remains are incorporated into concrete and cast into slender, striated columns that recall birch bark. A five-foot column, one inch in diameter, can house the remains of up to sixty individuals.

Arranged as paths, groves, boundaries, or clusters, the columns create an experiential landscape of mourning and remembrance composed of both living birch trees and abstracted memorial markers. The project’s most recent iteration, The Nomadic Burial Project, responds to contemporary mobility through a portable stone-and-disk sculpture that can travel with the living, asking how memory, ritual, and grief might remain active across distance and change.

Across its iterations, The Architecture of Death: Sites of Remembrance translates awareness, compassion, and material inquiry into spatial form, proposing more sustainable and adaptive ways to hold loss, memory, and interdependence.

Birch Grove has received recognition including the Mrachek Fellowship Award.

As an entry point into this research, I began with a case study of Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven—the first charted cemetery in the United States.
The image on the left shows clay pressed into the surface of one of the oldest headstones, capturin

Here conceptual mapping of a familial plot translates each grave into a field of pinholes—points of light emerging from darkness.
These studies began to shift my thinking—from documentation toward translation, and from inscription toward light.

At this scale, the project engages broader architectural and theoretical questions around death, ritual, and the built environment.
By integrating cremains into architectural elements, it materializes a liminal space between life and death. The colum

Nomadic Burial Project, a recent iteration in this work—responds to the increasing transience of contemporary life.
The project takes the form of a portable stone and disk sculpture, designed to move with its users. In doing so, it reflects a cultura

Here is my stack.
This piece holds my own experience of grief—both the tangible and intangible losses that have shaped me. It marks not only the loss of people, but of places—formative environments I may never return to.
In this way, it becomes a phy

Returning from the personal to the collective, the Nomadic Burial Project becomes a meditation on ritual, memory, and impermanence.
It engages the question of how we preserve and carry the memory of the deceased in ways that resonate with contemporar