To some people, the idea of being buried alive is the most uncanny thing of all. Revisiting the traditional tombstone concept, we wanted to confront it with the idea of a certain openness to the idea of death. Two large untreated steel doors open up, revealing three floors of burial spaces that layer generation above generation while two floor traps reveal the underworld of the ancestors. Travertine as a chosen material reinforces this effect in the built-in reading of its horizontal strata, like an archaeological dig extruded out of the earth. Semiotic play of signs, the large door handle becomes cross while a few flowers inserted into the ground soften the cold of steel.
Thereupon I left and resumed my wandering,
To the wide world’s end. We came to the Gate of Gold,
Racing the rushing wind to the spring of Purity
Bestriding the Pole of Division, I looked back behind me.
Traversing the four dimensions,
Roving the six directions of space,
high in the aurora’s cracks and fissures
I passed and, far below, in the bottomless pit.
In sheer depths, the earth above was invisible,
in the vastness of the heights, the sky could not be seen.
When I looked, my startled eyes saw nothing,
when I listened, no sound met my bewildered ear.
Thus, transcending inaction, I attained the great clarity,
And entered the precincts of the Great Beginning.
Pérez-Gómez Alberto, Polyphilo or the dark forest revisited
Project Status: Built.
Project Team: Karim Nader with Andrew Georges and Charbel Abou Chacra.
Photography by Marwan Harmouche.