Inside the Machine That Will Turn Your Corpse Into Compost
When you die, do you want to be buried or cremated? If the architect Katrina Spade gets her Urban Death Project to work, you might have a third option: compost.
If Spade’s first recomposition center opens in Seattle in 2023 as planned, it’ll be an airy, spiritual place where people can carry their loved ones’ corpses to a final rest—and put those corpses’ decomposition to an eco-minded use. She describes the facility as part funeral home, part place of memorial, and part public park. “I think there’s value in creating places where we’re thinking about death and its role in our lives, and the fact that it’s coming for all of us,” Spade says.
The trick is getting the decomposition right. Spade is working with soil scientists to perfect the process, and designing the building around the concrete core that’ll make it work. Imagine a three-story rectangular silo filled with wood chips, with a room on top. During memorial services, mourners carry the shrouded body up a ramp that winds around the core to this room. Here, the family members lower the body onto a bed of wood chips inside an open door in the floor. That door is the top of a 6-foot-by-10-foot concrete bay that adjoins multiple other bays, like a grid of elevator shafts. Mourners cover the body with additional wood chips and close the door.
https://www.wired.com/2016/10/inside-machine-will-turn-corpse-compost/?mbid=nl_102516_p8&CNDID=30772003
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