"Ideas for the graveyard of the future" ("Ideen für den Friedhof der Zukunft") have been selected

The competition for young people "Space for Mourning – ideas for the cemetery of the future" has been decided. The jury awarded two first places to Samuel Schubert (Bauhaus University Weimar) and to Ricarda Leandra Bock and Emily Kern (HafenCity University Hamburg). A third prize went to Anna Kopácsi (Bauhaus University Weimar). A total of 45 papers had been submitted.

Cemeteries need to be rethought in many ways. Current social developments in dealing with dying, death and mourning form the basis for new places and spaces and their spatial-architectural framing. Therefore the competition "Raum für Trauer" asked for the cemetery of the future. What could a cemetery look like that could better meet the needs of mourners and take into account the basic psychological functions of a burial site? What could such a cemetery accomplish – not conceived as a place for the dead, but as a space for the living? Which design and which offers could help to give mourning an active place in society again and thus break the taboo on death?

The aim of the competition was to develop proposals for the conception and design of spatial situations at the Ohlsdorf cemetery that can facilitate individual or communal rituals and actions of public, but also personal farewell. In this sense, the competition was looking for innovative, experimental and daring concepts for the cemetery of the future.

Participants should design situations within a superordinate structure that can be designed, perceived and handled in different ways. These places or spatial situations should make mourning actions of different individuals and social groups possible. The social space structure should be composed of private, community and public areas. A stay at the place of burial should also have a healing and positive effect on people. Contributions were expected from the participants of the competition which deal with the following levels in a focused or integrative way:

• the place of burial as a space for individual mourning and personal mourning
• the spatial structure of the cemetery including the degree of the publicity of its subspaces,
• a contemporary program,
• contemporary aesthetics and appealing atmospheres,
• possibilities for future governance of cemeteries and/or common areas in cemeteries.

This was particularly successful for the three prize-winning works, according to the jury.

At the same time, it was noticeable in the 45 submissions that the focus was less on the conception of the concrete place of burial and its significance for a successful mourning work, but rather that the students dealt more with the general and public areas of the cemetery. How little knowledge of the significance of mourning for the functionality and significance of the cemetery has been incorporated into the designs corresponds to the little developed awareness of society as a whole that the grave site and the active actions at it play a central role for the relatives in processing an existential experience of loss. Knowledge of the significance of psychodynamic processes in the context of individual mourning work should be taught more at universities so that this knowledge can be incorporated into the planning considerations for cemeteries as metastructures and burial sites as microstructures. Every citizen knows what the functions of schools, hospitals or hospice facilities are, but there is widespread ignorance of the individual and socially relevant functions of the cemetery. It remains the central task of all associations, societies and trades involved in cemeteries to communicate this to the public in all clarity.