A heated subject? - extending The Last Journey within the Danish welfare state

During the first decades of the new millennium, especially those aspects of the institutionalization of death in the welfare state pertaining to the body have undergone significant rationalization.

New central crematoria, hearses for four coffins, and the connection of crematorium ovens to district heating infrastructures have all caused public debate. However, centralization has also conditioned a certain concentration of architectural ambition coming to expression in the new crematoria. This project takes a closer look at how spatial implications of rationalization-eager cremation politics has become ‘compositional material’ in specific architectural expressions in which articulations of rationalization is woven into afterimages of a plethora of pathos formulas stemming from architecture’s millennia-long involvement with death.