Wednesday, March 29, 2006 | Permalink
A very old story indeed but it involves a perennial favorite here on Pruned. Architect John Ronan apparently wants to turn Chicago's old main post office behemoth — located a mere block away from the Sears Tower in downtown — into the largest municipal cemetery in entire world. And I'm all atwitter.
Once the major processing and storage center for interstate commerce and communication, John Ronan wants to return the building to its former function, though this time to process and store something of a different sort: dead bodies — by the millions. And he sees them “floating up the Chicago River, driving down the Eisenhower, riding in on the rails.”
It's worth mentioning that Union Station and the Greyhound Station are a block away, and the Blue line, which connects directly to O'Hare International Airport, is even closer. In fact, it sits on top of rails, an expressway, and a subway. It could not have been better sited. The singularity of a spectral vortex. An axis mundi.
There are a lot things we like about the project. Actually, we like everything about it. Obviously at the top of the list are its location and its fidelity to the existing façade and superstructure.
Also at the top is Ronan's theatrical staging of a funeral: “A funeral barge floats silently down the Chicago River to the site where the Old Post Office once stood. A figure clad in white steps onto the river landing, and leads those gathered at the river's edge up an incline to the foot of the large, rusting steel doors. The figure knocks. A hollow echo precedes the slow opening of the doors to reveal a long hall lined on one side with chapels. The white figure leads the group to the open chapel where the ritual of life and death takes place. The rear wall of the chapel opens wide, leading the funeral party to the crypts above. Upstairs, the funeral procession winds through the glass crypts, past the reliquaries that hold souvenirs of lives now past. The reflection of candle flames flicker in the polished floor, animating the wind that passes through the open facade.”
In a lot of ways, Ronan's proposal finds close affinity with the current vogue in green burial. For instance, there are no water-guzzling grass lawn, and no lawns also mean no toxic fertilizers to maintain a healthy, luxurious shade of green and to intimate a vision of Paradise to soothe grieving visitors.
Additionally, for a planned internment of millions of dead bodies, it's a highly efficient use of so little land, reusing, as it were, what's already there: “Seventy percent of what's in landfills right now is old buildings. The silliest thing would be to put a green building in its place [and] you carted away this three-million-square foot thing.”
Owing to its central location, the funeral cortege could make use of public transportation. If a CTA train car can be gutted and transformed into Santa's sleigh — with a Santa, his reindeers, elves and carollers merrily riding back and forth across Chicago, roofless(!!!) in the dead of winter — so can it be converted into a hearse.
Lastly, you can probably set the heater and air condition at very low levels.
In his novel Being Dead, Jim Crace describes how his dead protagonists, doctors of zoology, would have been mourned had they died a hundred years earlier. They would have been “lamented publicly,” he writes, “hysterically, without embarrassment.” They would have been dressed in “their best clothes and shoes, their wounds disguised, their hair slicked back, eyes shut, mouths shut, his hand on hers, their faces rhyming.” The living would be in danger of brushing against dead flesh. The room where they lay would “smell of camphor, candlewax and soap, and be as full of coughs and hard-back chairs as a doctor's waiting room.”
Death, in other words, was sensuously celebrated.
The mourners, women first, would come as soon as it was dark to start their venerations, weeping till their shoulders shook, tapping on the floorboards with their boots and sticks, rattling their bracelets and their cuffs. Whoever had the squeaky chair or the loosest floorboard to creak or the most resounding of sobs could count herself the most distraught. The greater the racket the deeper the grief. A hundred years ago no one was silent or tongue-tied, as we are now, when death was in the room. They had not yet muzzled grief or banished it from daily life. Death was cultivated, watered like a plant. There was no need for whispering or mime. Let the hubbub drive the devils out, they'd tell themselves. Let's make a row. Let's shout.
Of course, it's a different story now, especially in the US, where rituals of mourning have been reduced to tasteless, innocuous TV dinners. Just do it, and be done with it.
Lynn Becker, “If it Looks Like a Mausoleum....” Chicago Reader (10 June 2005)
A second version of the article
John Ronan Architect
Roadside(america)memorial.com
Hill of Crosses
Forever Fernwood, Part II
Forever Fernwood
(And a drive-by speculation at the end of this post)
Labels: adaptive reuse, cemeteries, Chicago, sacred plains
Thus, instead of the tasteless display of death celebrated through TV dinners, converted post offices around the world could become metaphors for the ability to take it with you, where 'it' is eternal status as a high-profile shopper! Eternal rest between Harvey Nicks and Shogun.
Cities without canals will have to rely on solemn dirigibles gliding through dusk draped in black, illuminated with candles that wink out one by one as the procession nears its final stop.
Meanwhile, chthonic technicians will be preparing the ground for the largest campaign ever, mapping out virtual realms of hierarchical and cartesian regimentation necessary to the realisation of an eternal afterlife. Or at least until the next one comes along.
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