The designs for a non-denominational funerary chapel for Washington, DC and a funerary urn for Donald Judd were just published in Spain and highlighted in a special issue of the magazine Márgenes Arquitectura (Vol. 2, no. 5, 2012). Both projects were designed under the mentorship of Juhani Pallasmaa, Julio Bermudez, and Greg Hall and explored the notion of death in aesthetic experience. While life is a journey, it is also a swinging pendulum that can appear to deny emotional stasis. Our emotions are often driven by the oppositions we encounter. Consequently, the experiences of life are often viewed as tensions, polarities, and contrasts and range in form: ups and downs, sickness and health, pain and pleasure, despair and hope, loss and recovery, noise and silence. The common heritage of existence leads us to face the greatest polarity of being in the world: life and death. Regardless of one’s religious or metaphysical beliefs, notions of one’s mortality can be interpreted in innumerable ways. Nevertheless, there is an architecture that may lead to a deeper ontological understanding of the world by appealing to bodily and sensory experience through the poetics of materiality and spatial experience. Each project in this case assists individuals in confronting death by dealing with the poetics of silence, light, healing, and truth in architecture.

More information on the projects can be found at the following links:

https://brandonro.com/2011/12/22/mortem-obire-funerary-chapel/

https://brandonro.com/2011/12/11/ultimate-existence-an-urn-in-memoriam-of-donald-judd/