Molly Moran
Architecture History 2
Jon Davey
MWF 12 -1
Book Report

The Architecture of Death
The Transformation of the Cemetery in Eighteenth-Century Paris
By Richard A. Etlin

Common knowledge states that one should only fix something if that something is broken and according to Richard Etlin Paris’ cemeteries in the eighteenth-century were really broken. The most vivid example given by the book is the Cemetery of the Holy Innocents, in which one too many bodies were buried. So many were people from rich to poor were buried at Holy Innocents and other Paris churches to secure the dead a place in heaven that the land lost its ability to decompose. The lingering dead gave way to hundreds of problems like hygiene and cleanliness problems, Holy Innocents was right next to the market place, the disease and pestilence that the rotting flesh caused more to die, and even the fear of being buried alive was born during this era in Paris. Thus, to solve the problem and ultimately get out of the middle ages someone had to re-think/ re-design cemeteries.
The first solution was to move the cemeteries out of Paris, but then the problem of how to get people to actually use them arose. Now, the problem became an architecture problem how to design architecture for the dead. Architecture that will be usable by the public and not develop problems that the cemetery of the Holy Innocents developed. It became somewhat of a competition between architects; between those in the Academy and those not in the Academy. Many design and sketches in the book were possibilities for a cemetery. Boullee and many others work off of the past pulling pieces of history forward, like the use of a pyramid: small, large, stepped, smoothed, etc. Historical elements of Greek, roman, Egyptian are clearly demonstrated in the drawings of the book laminating the various symbols and metaphors of death we see today. Like when we went to St. Louis cemetery and saw all the Greek and Egyption mausoleums.
“Despite all of the transformations in form and use, the cemetery in those times always furnished a landscape, either architectural or horticultural, as well as metaphysical, which reflected the underlying bonds and tensions of social and individual life.” (page 368) In conclusion the book The Architecture of Death explains the ever evolving architecture that is steeped in both tradition and whimsy of an individual person because as Danse Macabre said, “By Divine sentence
No matter what your estate
Whether good or evil, you will be
Eaten by worms. Alas, look at us,
Dead, stinking, and rotten.
You will be like this too.” (Page 4-5)
1. If the original problem was space why were designs, such as Boullee, even designed at such large scale?
2. Why did the fear of being buried alive have to born because of the Holy Innocents? Because if it hadn’t then there wouldn’t be all these zombie movie that I am too chicken to see.