There is an architectural space of death which, until our own time, has given rise to little comment. Yet in the tissue of urban and rural space, death forms a network of places and objects, with its allegories and symbols, its signs and its reference points, forming a specific course.

Reconsideration of the Past

The Dead Space Studio (2001-2002) began as a reconsideration of previous research and conservation efforts concerning New Orleans' "Cities of the Dead." It has sought to go beyond architectural analysis and the physical restoration of the tombs and monuments to issues of past and contemporary meanings and associations of these places as cultural urban landscapes and the related aspects of use, abandonment, ritual, and preservation of many such historical necrogeographies.

The work has focused further on an exploration of how earlier site histories have influenced current attitudes and values and how these, partly as invented narratives, have helped to shape motives and methods of preservation of these places over time. Such concerns are related to the larger cultural questions of the 'construction of identity' and the 'invention of tradition' that have been of interest to historians, anthropologists, and sociologists for at least a decade. Moreover they beg renewed consideration of such places--as J.B. Jackson has long observed--as social constructs formed over time rather than only as designed entities, "regarded first of all in terms of living rather than looking."1 Consequently, the role of history, personal and collective memory, and changing concepts of space and time--as well as death--in the making of such places all need to be better understood. In so doing we can begin to reconstruct a greater understanding of New Orleans' early cemeteries in which physical transformations and cultural meanings can be studied by working back through time to reveal past realities and current conditions.

Opening quote: Ragon, Michel. The Space of Death. A Study of Funerary Architecture, Decoration, and Urbanism, Trans. A. Sheridan. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983), 21.

Text adapted from Frank G. Matero, Dead Space: Defining the New Orleans' Creole Cemetery, Exhibit at Graduate School of Fine Arts, University of Pennsylvania, April 2002.

1. As quoted in Paul Groth, "Frameworks for Cultural Landscape Study," Understanding Ordinary Landscapes, Eds. Paul Groth and Todd W. Bressi, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 21.