The Embrace proposes a vision for death practices, attitudes, and interment methods for the year 2150. The project directly challenges the prevailing culture of death denial and anxiety, and in contrast proposes a future where death is fully embraced, with complete honesty, decay, and consciousness. The Embrace is the embodiment of a new civilization that fully accepts and embraces our own mortality, celebrates the cyclical nature of the natural world, and rejoices at the decay and temporality of our existence. The project combines two existing concepts surrounding death: Sky Burial and Medical Assistance in Death (MAiD). Sky Burial, traditionally practiced by some First Nation communities in North America, Tibet, and Iran, is the process where the deceased are left in high open places for nature to reclaim, cultivating a deep and harmonic relationship with animals and the natural world. By merging MAiD with Sky Burial The Embrace creates a new paradigm of death practices and rewilds, naturalizes and ushers in a new relationship to death.
The Embrace begins with a gondola ride up North Vancouver’s Coliseum Mountain to a tree lined plateau, where individuals receiving MAiD along with their loved ones, are welcomed into a cavernous interior of columns and stillwater pools. An accessible pathway winds towards the final room, allowing for peaceful contemplation and looping paths as a way of architecturally providing consent and opportunity to turn back. Upon entrance into the final room, visitors are met with an outstretching vista of the mountain landscape and view of Vancouver gently framed within billowing curtained walls. It is here where individuals will take in their last moments while their death is peacefully administered. After the family says their final goodbyes, the body is then raised upwards, passing through the now opened skylight to the forested roofscape. The body is then gifted to the animals as it is laid out on one of five rooftop plinthes, the animals then completing the full skeletonization of the corpse and returning of the human remains to the earth in honest reciprocity. At the Embrace nothing is buried, hidden, or unnaturally intervened with as death is allowed to exist in its interconnected and unshakable raw beauty.