Life in Ruins

Among the most lasting works of architecture are the
tomb and the monument. The fact that these have
outlasted other kinds of edifice would suggest that
the question of death was historically of paramount
importance to architecture - at least in the West.
But what about more recently? Scholarship in
twentieth-century architectural history seems to have
neglected the question of death, being more concerned
with the heroic or utopian side of modernism. Taking
issue with the story of twentieth-century
architecture as it is often told, this book seeks to
address a lacuna in scholarship. It examines the
work of three major architects of the last century,
who evinced a strong concern with the funerary genre
throughout their lives. Of greater importance,
it argues that certain of the more reflexive or
progressive approaches to funerary design at this
time were marked by a rejection of the traditional
language of the monument, which denied the temporal
nature of this world, and colored instead by the
Romantic tropes of ruin and decay - tropes
evocative of the transience of things and the cycles
of life.