The architects redesigning death
Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western world to our genius in erasing death from our consciousness. We have airbrushed the deceased from our lives with a ruthless efficiency, banishing them to suburban cemeteries where they can spend eternity unvisited. Burials and cremations are today spiritless, functional affairs, death rituals perfunctory, public grieving rare, graves unworthily negligible or unspeakably vulgar, our wakes pretexts to get drunk and obliterate the memory of what just happened. I exaggerate, but not much. The Maltese architect Anthony Bonnici wants to change all that. He wants to design death anew, create a
