Tamsin Green

所　属
Graduate School of Tokyo Institute of Technology

作品概要

With the ageing Japanese society, death will become much more frequent in daily life. More than1.1 Million Japanese deceased and in, 2035 that figure is expected to rise to 1.7 million deaths. In addition to the greater number of elderly, the population is decreasing and contemporary families are increasingly geographically dispersed, leaving no one to care for the old-style communal burial plots. The rapid increase of the death figure begs the question, where will all the bodies go? There is a demand for a new type of burial space that responds to the social, economic and environmental problems associated with the traditional cemetery.

The project is divided in to two sections; firstly a research and analysis based work, Deciphering the narrative. My method of investigation begins with observation, this process started with the cemeteries and crematoriums in Tokyo, but extended to the more obscure, such as studies of cultural implication and symbols of nature in death mythology and the relationship between spiritual and bodily entities. As the project has many layers and fragments of interpretation, the narrative framework effectively digests the research and provides a strategy for design. It creates a storyboard that follows imaginary ‘characters’ that represent three threads of investigation from an urban scale through to the metaphoric routes in the design proposal of a crematorium and memorial, Jonan-Jima Mystic Mound. The 3 characters represent the 3 key participants or occupants of the spaces for the dead, the living, the deceased and the mortician. The mortician, Genji, is essentially a shadow whose presence enables the meeting of the other two characters, Yuki and Nobu.  By rediscovering the historical sublime quality of spiritual space, can the integration of cultural analysis and contemporary theories of psychological space lead to a more engaging form of funerary architecture?

The project is not intended to be read as a final entity, but as a framework for investigation and as an initial application of this design method to a building.