city of the dead
The City of Cleveland is shrinking. People are fleeing our intemperate weather, our corrupt politicians and their greedy machines, our stagnant economies, and our feckless civic endeavors in droves. Whole residential neighborhoods have literally disappeared. Once entrenched ethnic ghettos have migrated out of the city or dissipated into the churning, dynamic, but also homogenizing urban perimeters. In the wake of the departing masses and their taxable incomes, swathes of Cleveland are re-opening to the sky, retuning to nature. The metabolism of the city is slowing down. The city fabric is not host to aggregation and accretion of growth. Rather, the city is decaying and fading away, wearing the death mask of dilapidation and neglect. The city is composed of unintentional ruins—ruins of neighborhoods, ruins of infrastructure, ruins of institutions. As the city shrivels, a new program needs to be inserted or applied to the changing landscapes to save the remaining surviving fabrics. Spatial and programmatic stints need to be applied to allow the city to continue to metabolize productively, avoiding self-consumption and destruction. The once industrial city needs to be given a new mission. This proposal seeks to create a City of the Dead, an entire system of cemeteries and burial architectures, throughout the entire vacuous city of Cleveland. Although cemeteries used to be located at the edges of cities (the Via Appia in Rome, or Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, for example), this proposal seeks to locate burial areas at the hollowed-out cores of Cleveland. The city will become the most economical place to be interned in the country. The cemeteries will serve as permanent placeholders for green spaces, valleys, and patchworks. The Forrest City will return with lush gardens and manicured lawns and fragrant bosques. Burial Architectures will emerge in the city that precipitate and anticipate their ruination, rather than unintentionally submit to architectural death. The picturesque landscape will return to and displace the city grid. The city will be empty. But it will be beautiful.
