The project explores the use of representation as a design tool through a proposal for a funeral ritual at Dudok’s Westveld Crematorium in Dreihuis, Netherlands. The design followed a period of research into Japanese woodblock-printed narrative scrolls, which use non-perspective projection to create continuous, flowing scenes. This way of drawing depicts space being created fleetingly through behaviour, portraying a fluid condition that departs from the emphasis on form often encountered in architectural drawing.
This lead to a reflection on impermanence and the role of ritual in a funeral.The proposed ritual explores the notion of transience by employing a collection of furniture-like objects to orchestrate a sequence of moments within the funeral, at each point connecting with a particular space within the existing wooded landscape and early twentieth-century crematorium building. The representation of the ritual synthesises these reflections, taking the form of a three-meter scroll made from a series of hand-cut woodblock prints, each converted into textures and collated into a digital collage. This was printed onto a heavy, continuous roll to express the entirety of the project in a single, crafted image.