Units of Care



The New Orleans cemetery is a sensationalized space whose commercialized nature has rendered it a tourist oddity. Its position as a place of pure spectacle provides a reference point for questioning our current relationship with death. In the 19th and 20th century, death was something experienced in the home, yet the modern man was born in the hospital and died in the hospital.


In our contemporary world, the project questions how we can imagine a new scenario for dealing with death and the  memory of those that passed when there is no longer a medicalized reason to separate ourselves from it.
My approach in imagining a different scenario places itself in neither the home nor the hospital but rather in an in-between that has a visible presence, while being a pure interior.

This new type looks back at the 19th and 20th century type of the tuberculosis hut, which like the sanatorium was more often a hospice space than a place of healing.
Looking to this type’s features for precedents, the new structures result in curated spaces that produce architecture from the patient’s point of view.

These new units, which provide individual spaces for care, propose a distinction in our understanding of death in a culture that aims to memorialize the individual.

Spring 2018