HOOK

Tirtha - Recomposting Temple Complex from O(U)R

“The basic epistemic conceit of the project is "....something becomes something else....". The laws of physics suggest, indeed require, that everything in the universe, 'dead' or 'alive' is made of the same sub-atomic particles and forces and is subject to all the same laws, without exception. This suggests therefore that birth and death, while indisputably significant 'events' in this complex sub-atomic particle configuration we call life, are in fact little more, and nothing less, than reconfigurations of sub-atomic particles and forces, a process that is enacted in the universe in a myriad different ways, everywhere. Life on planet earth is no doubt a very special event; even so, it is part of the infinite diversity of particularly re-configuration - "...something becomes something else..." again and again, that is fundamental to the processes of the universe.

Tirtha is a Sanskrit word that means "crossing place, ford." In India, there are dozens of these places, some of which have become pilgrimage sites. In this project the temple is at the core of the tirtha, but ‘the crossing’ is a drawn-out spatial and temporal process that encompasses the whole site and its program. In that sense the tirtha is embedded in a type of ‘temenos’ or sacred area, the intensity of which is thickened over time and use.”

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The Weighing Temple is the pivot and the center of the entire Recomposting Complex. At the certain point the family and friends of the deceased will have to hand over the body to the recomposing facility. This is, from the ‘secular’ point of view, the ‘moment-of-truth’, an opportunity for a ritualistic acceptance and acknowledgement of the recompos(t)ed destiny, and origins, of all human life. 

To ‘receive’ the body from the family, we have designed a receiving temple whose focus is a large and magnificent balance designed to weigh the body, a measure that on the one hand necessary to calculate the amount of composting materials required for its cocooning, and on the other, it mirrors the weighing of the infant that is routinely done at birth. Conceptually speaking, from a recomposing perspective, the difference between the birth and death weight of a person can be thought of as the ‘progress’ made by that person. The body is measured against carefully delineated ingots of gold, and the difference in measure, between the birth and final weight of the person, is announced with due ceremony for all to hear by the Presiding Priestesses, the ‘death-doulas’. The Priestesses, who are both mistresses of ceremony and recomposing scientists, are dressed in ceremonial regalia that derives equally from the ‘savage-beauty’ aesthetic of Alexander McQueen, in particular his Voss show, and the ceremonial dresses of Native American shamans.

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The Columns of the temple are painted in red, white and yellow to evoke the dominant colorations of the corporeal body with all its blood, muscle, organs, bones, spleen and feces. The Temple does not seek to sublimate the body.

Mirrored across the temple, jutting into the planted landscape, is a paved walk with rest stops and a small reflecting pool, which could be developed into a bioswale.  

Above the Balance, hanging from the roof of the Temple are a series of inter-twined wind-horns. Self-blowing (no one ‘plays’ them, though their access to wind can be turned on and off,) these horns are imagined as visual and acoustic totemic objects, fetishes in the ritualistic sense of the word, intended to sculpturally encapsulate the arbitrary uncertainties of life, the inexorable and perpetual turning of the ‘levers’ and ‘pumps’ of the universe - the quantum uncertainties, might be the technical term from particle physics - that are always at play, enveloping human life, simultaneously sustaining it and breaking it down by pushing it in the direction of ever higher entropy, the process we call aging. Their horizontality is designed to offset the usual verticality associated with death in monotheistic religions. Like all fetish objects of yore, the horns perform no literal function but are intended to embody the ‘magic’ of recomposition that is birth and death - “…..something becomes something else….”

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After the body is received and cocooned at the temple, it is carefully lowered into a womb-like, self-running boat via a loading dock built into the ‘back’ of the temple, into one of the double-squares. In plan, this dock and its access passage reproduce the form of a garbh-griha, the ‘womb-home’ of a Hindu temple. As the boat enters and leaves the dock, it reproduces the movements into and out of the birthing canal. 

As the boat emerges out of its loading dock and makes a left turn, it finds itself enveloped within a C-shaped marina, made out of boardwalks, a playful set of viewing steps or ghats, and a viewing platform, something like a belvedere. Together, the ghats, the boardwalk and the belvedere form an amphitheater for the friends and families of one cocooned in the boat, to view and bid a ‘final’ farewell. The marina in this way functions as a theatre, with the boat its evanescent stage.

The ghats are derived in form from the steps that line the edges of sacred rivers and sacred water tanks in Hindu India. They do not, however, function like ghats, in the sense that they are not intended for worshipping the water via ablution practices. They are simply a playful amphitheater. The steps make different configurations during high and low tides, marking the passage of time and our proximate connectedness to distant objects like the moon.

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