The living body has long been the site of cultural, political, and principled debate. The dead body amplifies these and other contested positions related to identity, strategic re-use, and commemoration.
Projects engaged urban and intimate scales simultaneously. Strategies interfaced with existing urban infrastructures, explored where and for how long a life is remembered, and re-qualified how society processes both the physical and emotional aspects of death. New sequences between civic and intimate territory infused the city while also providing an envelope for the delicacy of human grief.
Experimentation is essential to challenge certainty. Students were encouraged to push any inquiry to failure. Concepts rendered into new matrices, de-familiarizing expectations and opening new possibility.
Befitting the substantial scale and pragmatics of the urban death industry, projects were explored as infrastructures, strategically opportunistic in their catalyzing impact on both current culture and existing metropolitan systems.
Sometimes change must be radical.

Karla Rothstein, critic. Jennifer Preston, TA. Muchan Park, DA
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Jangwon Choi