Capriccio

program: Vertical Cemetery

location: Unbuilt

area: 42,000sf

Unbuilding

“The powerful originality of the capriccio derives from this deliberately artificial and intellectual reframing which creates an inventive and theatrical re-composition of a ‘second degree reality.’ It creates an even more intriguing and thrilling appeal to our sense and mind because of its exquisite ambiguity achieved through pictorial realism.”

-The Architectural Capriccio

The project began with a painting, a capriccio, and then found its original design. In a process reversed, the painting seeks to depict an arrested moment in a building’s history; not a moment paused in creation but, rather, a moment in its unbuilding. The building, as rendered in oils, no longer represents the imagined intensions of a false author. It has become structure, an armature for flora and fauna, an ark for the persistence of life that will continue without humanity’s interference or management.

The premise is simple: paint a structure in the future. The first conceit, borrowed from Adolf Loos: architecture can only be art when it is statuary or funerary. The second conceit: the project is speculation set in the future. Given these two totems to anchor an investigation, the painting assumes a fantastic program responding to rising sea levels. Where land becomes less tenable and where we stubbornly maintain traditions, a vertical cemetery rising above the charging waters satisfies the desires to memorialize and protect our loved one’s remains. Simultaneously pragmatic and vainglorious, a cemetery tower speaks to the importance of our personal and cultural histories as well as being a beacon of our determination to persist. While a logical design response, the painting begs the question, what would happen if we were unable to stem the tide of change and humans become obsolete?

Once the painting was complete, I returned to the origins and designed the building represented in the painting. Drawn earnestly and with rigor, the plans and renderings provide a vision of original intent, even though the narrative was completed before its inception. Questions of tectonics, distribution and lost symbolism are addressed in the normative architectural design, but these questions are shown to be illusory and irrelevant in a post-human world. The permanence of entombment and our domination of nature is revealed to be a charade and that our will cannot resist forces beyond ourselves. This is not to say that the structure or proposal is dystopian. Instead, this is a release; intentions are longer relevant, our monuments no longer revered. There is no loss as the structure, in its slow unbuilding, transforms and transcends, allowing the heirs of the Anthropocene Era to find new utility and purpose upon our drowned ashes.