Title: Mortality as Project
Chair:
Assist. Prof. Zavraka Despoina
Department
University
Abstract/Description:
The title Mortality as Project proposes a shift in discussing how architecture engages with death
—not as an event that simply terminates, but as an ongoing condition that shapes how we build, inhabit, and imagine the world-
Mortality is understood as a temporal framework: anticipated, managed, postponed, ritualized, or even denied through design.
Architecture has always negotiated this temporality, but it has not sufficiently/ convincingly encountered it (having exiled, removed or vanished it from healthy and hygiene cities/worlds).
From tombs, memorials, and sacred structures to hospitals, housing, infrastructures, and climate shelters, the built environment/sphere mediates between the finite human body and aspirations for permanence, continuity, and legacy.
To frame mortality as a project is to acknowledge that societies actively organize, spatialize, and design their relationship to death over time—through typologies, policies and technologies.
This session invites us to consider architectural practice as participating in contemporary “projects of mortality”.
Medicalization of dying, privatization or invisibility of death, management of risk and longevity, as well as the increasing role of architecture in responding to ecological extinction and planetary finitude form the epicenter of research within this group.
Mortality is no longer personal or symbolic; but it is infrastructural, environmental, and political.
By foregrounding mortality as a design concern rather than a taboo, the session opens space to posing critical questions: How does architecture register finitude in an era obsessed with resilience and optimization? What forms, spaces, or practices acknowledge decay, loss, and limits rather than resisting them? And how might architectural thinking reframe care, memory, and responsibility across human and non-human lifespans?
“Mortality as Project” ultimately challenges us to see architecture not only as a tool for sheltering life, but as a medium through which societies negotiate their relationship with time, vulnerability, and inevitable ending.