35_Lois Huguet and Franca Kind: New Forms of Funeral Places

Lois Huguet

4th grade student of the National School of Architecture in Marseille, France but currently in a one year long exchange in the Quebec School of Architecture, in Canada.

Proposal for the Arch Out Loud architecture competition - DEATH AND THE CITY (2016)

"ALTERNATIVE - Could we suppose a complete physical disappearance of the deceased ?Replaced by funeral urns, filled with ashes, traditional burials disappear little by little. 

Sort of a body dematerialization, the funeral rite asks a new question. And it’s legitimate. Japan suffers from a high lack of space. Decedents and ashes cannot be stored anymore. And if an alternative has to be found, the answer could be sought in contemporary technologies. Thus, a new state changement is allowed : from the human being to the digitized being. The bouddhist ritual is all about releasing the spirit from its physical shell. Once that happened, which value keeps the body? Then comes the Alternative. At the ritual’s outcome, the spirit becomes a digitized energy, stored into the core of the tower. And on a constant dynamic, the light he became falls off the tower and storms the ground and walls of the city, reacts to the environnement and the sounds, even to man’s steps. As a bioluminescent body, his presence is sort of a dream, a fantasy. The spirit is here with us, and everywhere else at the same time."

The images you've seen on my instagram is part of a visual research for an ongoing architecture competition, following the Arch Out Loud. Then, I'm not able to share them under the name of that competition until it's completey over. But, as they will not appear on the final result, it could be named as a visual research on "new forms of funeral places", a personal and ongoing study.