Cemeteries

You can tell a lot about a city by its relationship to the dead. In his book Architectural Principles in the Age of Historicism architecture historian, professor extraordinaire, and all around good guy Dr. Robert Jan van Pelt argues for what he calls the five-square city. The first square is the city wall, the other four divide the inside of the wall into quadrants. The agora is the place of society and politics (where people meet people), the acropolis is the place of the worship (where people meet divinity), the oikos is the space of private families, and the necropolis is the place of the dead (where people face their own mortality). This model is constructed based on an examination of classical Athens and is meant to describe the functions of the city rather than the physical layout. But it is generally true we still keep these functions separate.

It is interesting which of these functions has increased in size and which decreased in the transition from classical to modern city. The agora as a marketplace has increased exponentially but as the place of politics it has all but disappeared. Every city larger than a few thousand people used to have many spaces dedicated to the discussion of how our political life ought be constructed - from the official spaces of city hall and town offices, to the Union halls, public places set aside for free speech, etc. Now the city hall has become the corporate headquarters and public speech is forced on to the street.

The acropolis has shrunk also. Its decreased role in the city has matched that of the agora in the pace and proportion of decline. Take two examples from my own life; I moved from Galt to Toronto (Galt is one of the small towns that where amalgamated into Cambridge). Two of the four corners in Galt's major intersection are held by churches - I find it interesting both of them are Presbyterian. In an aside, the two started out as a single congregation that split over the purchase of a set of bells. Those who left because they believed the bells were an indulgence stole them (the bells) before they could be installed and they have never been recovered. The town also boasts a Catholic church and a couple minor (possibly heretical) variants of the Protestant faith. On the five minute walk from my apartment to the Architecture School, I passed either four or five churches (depending on the route).

Here in Toronto there are, of course, a great many churches but they don't stand out. In Galt, the churches are the tallest buildings in town. In Toronto, they are among the shortest. The meaning of this is made desperately confusing by the large number of Toronto's citizens who practice religions I know nothing about. I know, for instance, Sikhs have temples but I don't know what they look like or if they follow a pattern. Toronto has a large Asian population but I don't think Confucians have anything like a Church. Taoists are an off-shoot of Buddhism so I'm guessing no Churches there. I am crippled by my own ignorance. Yet this is not an indication that nothing can be said about the relative importance of the acropolis just that I cannot produce a nuanced opinion. In the classical city everyone knew what the temples looked like, what they were for, when they were used, how to behave in one, and a host of other related items. Galt is much closer to the classical city than Toronto in this regard. And Toronto, as one would expect, is more modern.

The oikos is even more complicated to analyze than the acropolis. The percentage of land given over to residential use is much larger in the modern city than the classical. This is a function of the size (population) of classical cities as well as the relative size of buildings. Here Rome is more revealing than Athens. Rome, at its peak, had a population of more than one million (link). Toronto (minus the Greater Toronto Area) has a population slightly less than three million (link). But far more than three times the space is devoted to residential use in Toronto than in ancient Rome. The center of Rome was the serial Fori. The Forum valley stretched from the Capitaline Hill to the Colosseum - the Capitaline Temples and the Flavian Amphitheater both exclude residential building but while the Colosseum is another manifestation of the agora, the Capitaline temples are a manifestation of the acropolis. Rome is easiest seen as a collection of residential buildings glommed on to the sides of massive public works. Toronto has no collection of public buildings similar to ancient Rome; it cannot match Rome in terms of the area devoted purely for public use. Instead that space is devoted to housing. It is safe to conclude the importance of the oikos has increased exponentially in the transition to the modern city.

The necropolis is almost completely invisible as a feature of modern cities. Most, like Toronto, will keep a patch of land to remember celebrity dead. The size, significance, and psychological importance of the cemetery decreases as cities get bigger, more modern. Unless they can be repurposed as tourist attractions (the AIA guidebook to Chicago lists the cemetery where Mies van der Rohe and Louis Sullivan are buried) they just disappear. This observation is complicated by the fact many religions less common in North America a century ago prefer cremation to burial. But in Rome, for example, a cremation inside the pomerium (city walls) was unthinkable.

When my brother bought a house his contract included a clause prohibiting him from running a crematorium in his basement. That's weird. But it wouldn't be in there unless it had been a problem previously. And it says something about our attitude toward our dead.

Maybe this is something as remarked upon as the everting of now to include everything. The past, as an idea, disappears into the continuous digital present. Maybe our disregard for our dead tells us something about our view on the future - its pure alien-ness. In the ancient city the necropolis was there to remind people where they came from, to instruct them how to behave, to reassure them death wasn't completely final. Modernity has attacked all these notions. I don't think it's accidental the only really great Modernist cemetery (Woodland Cemetery by Gunnar Asplund) is known primarily from images that do not include any graves.

We are increasingly unwilling to provide the dead with their own real estate. And this is important - not because I think, as many do, the awareness of our own mortality is the key to the human condition - because it is a willful rejection of the past. A fetishization of the present.

Cemeteries and casinos are the only places I can think of where clocks are forbidden. Tick tock. Tick tock. I think it would be wonderfully perverse to have a clock built in to a headstone. Maybe this is the only important thing I can write about cemeteries at the moment. They are an escape from the regulation of your life and mine by artificial time. Small time. Mechanical time.

I think cemeteries are beautiful. Whether they are ill-tended and overgrown or hyper-manicured (or any state in between). They aren't really all that different from playing fields - which I don't find beautiful. So I think the difference (aside from the corpses) is the absence of consensual time.

There is a great debate (all furor and dudgeon and righteousness) currently about proposals to build casinos on Toronto's Waterfront. I think it's a terrible idea. And it seems everyone who isn't going to make a lot of money from the casinos agrees with me. Several alternative schemes have been presented to the City - what might be built instead of casinos. One or two of those are quite good and almost any of them would improve this City immensely.

I'd like to add my two cents. I think we should create huge cemeteries on the Waterfront. There could be other stuff too I guess (no casinos obviously). But a great cemetery looking out over Lake Ontario would be a fine thing.