In a fast moving metropolitan city like London, urban pockets that alter the rhythm and synchrony of life can be described as heterotopias. Cemeteries are such sites that slow down and collect time. They sediment memories of the lived past and the potential future and are therefore regarded as spaces of another realm that operate between the spatial and the temporal. Historically, these sites were found entangled with the living city’s core where people gathered to exchange shared experiences. Today, the speed of the city, along with its rapid expansion, no longer allows for such spaces to occur within the living realm. Spaces that hold memory are detached from other urban systems, and therefore, appear as isolated memory islands. The problem is, without the interaction of people and their use as collective public ground, these spaces are threatened by the loss of memory and can no longer facilitate experiential memories. While the creation and disappearance of new layers of memory can be regarded as a natural cycle of any city, the continuous expansion of funerary spaces outwards means that there is no room in the contemporary city for new memory spaces to be formed.

This research examines the role of the cemetery as a memory space that can act as an interface between such dead and living memory making practices, and challenges society’s changing attitudes towards death that, over time, transformed funerary sites from collective public space to secluded necropoli. In an effort to disrupt the pattern of exclusion of death and memory from the urban fabric, and to accept death as a part of everyday life, this research is guided by the following main question:

How can the contemporary city accommodate new memory spaces within the programs of everyday life without compromising their inherent heterotopic nature?

By exploring the intersections between the layers of individual, collective, and experiential memory, this research defines what a new memory space in the contemporary city entails.

This thesis will examine how time-based design features in funerary architecture are manifested as architectural narratives, focusing on the experience of the visitor as they pass through the space. Accepting the transition period, from Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage, as the most prominent of the funerary rites, temporal elements in architecture for death take on a significant role to determine the experience of the visitors. These temporal elements guide the visitor’s spiritual journey through the various stages of transition.

Through the analysis of a selection of case studies that all use time as a medium in their architectural elements, this thesis will attempt to reveal the entangled relationships between the passage of time and the visitor’s self-reflection. The focus on a temporal approach will be used to understand how the episodic fragments of the architecture are unified into one symbolic transitory space. The research will, therefore, examine how the use of symbolism and metaphors of death and transition from one realm to the other translates into poetic architecture that orchestrates the experience of the visitor often in a sequential manner.