DEATH BED

advised by Andrew Witt

with Dutra Brown

The Death Bed imagines a speculative world where our domestic settings are completely anchored around the death of our bodies. In this world, the home’s primary function is to create an environment that can selectively decompose the body, extracting the maximum amount of nutrients from the decomposing flesh to feed it back to the earth. By carefully extracting the nutrients of human blood, the oxygen and proteins of the body are maximized to yield the greatest vegetation to feed our ecosystems. Whereas today we mark the death of our loved ones with tombstones and other markers of marble, granite, and other durable solids designed to be resistant to the effect of time, in this future the greatest respect to give to a loved one is to fully dissolve them back into the earth. It is a symbol of respect and accountability to the environment and a gesture that allows for one’s life to give to something beyond itself. This is a post-human world we acknowledge that the effects of our death have a longer-lasting impact on our environments than the time we are alive.

Within architectural history, there is one civilization that the project took a special interest in for its unique relationship with death. The Catalhoyuk civilization (7500 BC) used to bury their relatives directly under their sleeping areas in clay-covered pits. These pits would be unsealed when another family member died in order to lay them in the same hole.