Burial Sites

Burial sites are landscapes for memory, mourning, and ritual—spaces that mediate between the living and the dead, between here and an imagined beyond. They are one of the most vaulted typologies of landscape architecture, changing slower than most others because memory and loss resist rapid redesign. Traditionally, cemeteries manifest the symbolic order of a society—its collective relation to life, death, and nature. Their structures and voids give form to absence: tall trees stretching upward, monumental walls, emptiness that carries the gravity of loss. Yet a paradigm shift is underway: the “old nature,” once seen as separate and eternal, is no longer credible in the Anthropocene. There is no other world outside human influence; there is only this one. This shift has begun to reach burial practices. In more liberal contexts, new ecological burials are being developed—human composting, water cremation, biodegradable urns—that turn the human body back into soil, humus, and nutrient cycles. These practices replace embalming, concrete vaults, and CO₂-heavy cremations with material participation in ecological processes. Cemeteries are slowly becoming places not only of memory but also of ecological renewal, where death is absorbed into cycles of life. For landscape architects, the typology remains sacred but increasingly experimental—where design negotiates between symbolic continuity and ecological necessity.

/ Zaš Brezar

»Paradigm shift« has been, for at least a decade now, one of the most used phrases in landscape architecture. We use it mainly to address the need to focus on design with natural processes in mind. This is important as it concerns our core values, attitude towards nature, the understanding of natural processes and the […]

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