The Architecture of Death: Sites of Remembrance
The Architecture of Death: Sites of Remembrance is an ongoing research, design, and public art project exploring how architecture can help us live more consciously with death, grief, memory, and ecological change.
The work brings together architecture, sculpture, landscape, and ritual to imagine new forms of remembrance for a time when many people are increasingly disconnected from traditional burial practices and shared places of mourning. Rooted in Rachel Paupeck’s engagement with meditation, embodied awareness, and Buddhist practices of compassion, the project considers grief not only as a private experience, but as something that can be held collectively through space, material, movement, and gathering.
The research began with studies of Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven and developed into Birch Grove, a burial system composed of individual memorial disks threaded onto vertical poles. Each disk contains the cremated remains of one person mixed into concrete and stone and is marked with their name. Over time, the disks accumulate into collective memorial structures that can form paths, groves, thresholds, or places of pause.
Rather than a singular monument, Birch Grove is an adaptable system shaped by site, landscape, and community. Openings within the structures can also support birds, insects, and other forms of life, allowing remembrance to exist within a living ecology.
The project has since expanded into temporary installations, collective rituals, workshops, sound, and walking meditations. These works ask how remembrance might become more participatory and present in everyday life, without requiring a permanent monument or prescribed religious tradition.
The Nomadic Burial Project extends this research to the mobility of contemporary life, asking how memory and ritual might travel with people who no longer live near ancestral burial sites or permanent places of remembrance.
Across these works, The Architecture of Death asks how spaces, objects, landscapes, and rituals can create new ways to hold memory, encounter loss, and remain connected to one another.
