1.1. BACKGROUND OF THE STUDY.

1.1.1. TITLE.

BAGUIO CITY CEMETERY: A Neoteric Funerary Design Approach

of Sustainable Prefabricated Entombment.

1.1.2. THE NEED.

With the growth of population and urban expansion,

today many countries are facing the problem of scarcity of
available land. It's not just a problem for the living, but also the
dead, some countries like England, Norway, Greece are running out
of available burial plots. In other countries where available land is
abundant, shortage of available burial plots is still a problem in some
large cities (Philjake, 2018).

To address the shortage of available grave plots,

authorities are encouraging citizen to choose cremation instead of
burial, as cremated ashes require much smaller space.

However, cremation is discouraged and even opposed

by some religions, it conflicts with the believers' faith of resurrection.
In Greece, a country in which Orthodox is the prevalent religion,
cremation was not allowed. The situation changed several years
ago when the local authority lifted the restriction on options of
disposal of dead, allowing dead bodies to be cremated, so that the
shortage of burial space can be solved. The Church of Orthodox
accused the decision of the authorities, and suggests placing
coffins vertically to minimize the space needed for each dead
body.

Is there any other ways to address the problem of

scarcity of available land? When a city is getting very dense,
skyscrapers will be built to offer more spaces for the living, but can
skyscrapers be used to accommodate dead? If a believer doesn't
mind of being cremated or vertically buried, then he or she may not
mind of being buried in a skyscraper, in which the grave plots are
closer to heaven compared to graveyards on the ground, and the
views are better. Some architects and cemetery operators have
already come up with the idea of vertical cemetery. Below are
some interesting proposals of vertical cemeteries.

"In time, the city's tallest and largest building will

become a grave for all its citizens–the city's ever-changing
monument,"(Mcsherry, 2013). The precious land saved on the
ground, in turn, would be used for parks and buildings for the living.
The idea was met with a cacophony of protests—but also a few
strong supporting voices.

But why does the idea of a skyscraper burial seem to

disturb so many people?

First of all, it helps to know a bit about Norway's

situation. Norway, like many land-scarce countries, practices grave
recycling: Every citizen is allotted two decades in their spot before
the land is reused for other bodies (your family can pay to preserve
your space for longer, if they want). It's a practical solution—and it
worked fine until World War II.

That was when Norwegian law began requiring that bodies

be buried inside of air-tight plastic wrappers—the thinking being
that the tarps would prevent contamination of soil and water
source. But when the first batch of graves were turned over for
reuse, the bodies hadn't decomposed completely—thanks to the
protection of the plastic. As a result, the country is quickly running
out of spots to bury its citizens.
1.1.3. REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

1.1.3.1. Cemeteries

Cemeteries have a deep historical connection to the

local community. They bring residents closer to an understanding of
the past and help to provide insights into how people within the
area used to live. By looking at the headstones and reading details
about those that have passed, we can gain information on the
importance of individuals to the community at the time and the jobs
and social connections they had during their life (Fee, 2016).

A cemetery is also an important part of end of life

decisions, with your own funeral plot being an immensely personal
choice. Picking out your final resting place will give you peace of
mind and help you cope with your own mortality. Even if you plan
on cremation, we invite you to make the most of what a cemetery
in your community can do for you, both in this life and the next. (
Gallagher,2017).

Verticality

The side effect of population explosion is the rise of

space demands in the city. Verticality has become the practical
solution to answer the land needs in urban area. “Verticalism”
(Abalos, 2010) has just begun. This stacking methodology has been
applied to almost every building typology. We are now facing the
age of form re-creation in verticality: university campuses, museums,
libraries, fashion buildings, sport facilities, along with combination of
all these mixed with residential, hotel, and office typologies. They
are no longer strongly built as buildings that stand only one level.
Verticality is still under discussion if this is a complementary or
alternative way of thinking about the city. But we see transformation
and we have come to realize that the densification process is an
instrument with which we need to become familiar with (Abalos,
2010). If we appreciate sustainability as land management, then
being tall is probably the first action you can do as a designer. It not
only accommodates number of users in available land, but also
shapes identity and iconic element for the entire city or
neighbourhood. We are moving to a phase in which verticality is
seen as tolerance, not vandalism. Extrusion command has been
used to design architecture and replaced aesthetic principle,
particularly in rapidly urbanizing cities. ‘Form follows function’ has
changed to ‘form follows finance’ (Shannon and Vescina, 2003).
Design schemes are convinced as discontinues growths, but also as
functional mutations. Nowadays, mixed programs are performed
within the section of high-rise buildings. Buildings are not drawn
upon regularity anymore, but more upon operative variation of the
building outline (Gausa, 2003).

The innovation and creativity is somehow leading to

convince some new typologies that could possibly go vertical. In
last 5 years, we are introduced to “Vertical Park”, the combination
application of technology and new idea. As we discover how to
plant the trees on the floor slab, park function is immediately lifted
and garden is not always on the ground. However, verticality is still
not (yet) the solution for some specific typology. At the same time,
we still continue to build some public spaces and other buildings on
the ground, with only a single story to extensively occupy the best
available land. Zoo and cemetery are the biggest challenges for
this method. They are usually housed in a very wide landscape, not
few are located in urban area. Rising problem of lacking space,
these typologies somehow need to be transformed into vertical
form. It will help to resolve a growing spatial problem. The
concentration of this issue is not only the “verticalism” acceptance
as contemporary architecture form, but also the available burial
technology and methodology. Cremation has certainly become
more popular to both save burial cost land in urban area. But this
does not make cemetery obsolete. In some religions, cremation is
forbidden. The dead body is required to be buried. But in this case,
burial is not always on the ground. In this paper, the possibility of
verticality will be overlooked with religion/belief rules in burial.
Although some tribal beliefs had to take back the deceased from
their own province, due to being a migrant. This is a huge
contribution in reducing the number of buried bodies among the
public cemeteries.
 Cemeteries are usually end up with a less dominant
priority to be designed. It is somehow forgotten that this space gets
bigger and bigger each day. Houses could be squeezed, offices
could be shared, shops could be stacked, but not cemetery. Death
number can be decreased, but what has been buried cannot be
replaced. Cemetery has no other possibility than “extending”. Land
will always be constantly demanded for this typology. This will not be
such a big problem in suburbs, but it will be a completely different
story for urban area. The rapid population and economy growth in
Hong Kong causes a very big competition in land uses between the
live and the “dead”. According to the article ““Perfect Storm”
Brewing For Hong Kong Property Market” (2014), in 2014, housing
value (less than 40 square meters) in Hong Kong is 92,000 - 126,000
HKD. Property market and the need are increasing and there is no
possibility to replace them with cemetery in the top to-be-built list.
To optimize the space, some building developers have built tall
skyscrapers. Soon, this transformation will be applied to typology
that has caused problems of quantity.

Modular Architecture

Modular design refers to designing products by

organizing sub-assemblies and components as distinct building
blocks (i.e., modules) that can be integrated through configuration
to fulfill various customer and engineering requirements.

The main advantages of modular design include design

flexibility, augmentation, and cost reduction. Due to grouping the
components to each module, the designer can easily modify each
module instead of changing the whole design.

In addition, the system can be upgraded by adding

new functions simply by plugging a new module so that the system
can be augmented within a specific range. Furthermore, the
modularized components also make possible concurrent
engineering and flexible manufacturing. Modular design classified
all components in different products into variant and common
modules constructed in a core platform. By doing so, it becomes
feasible to customize large varieties of high demand products
through achieving economy of scale. Current product family design
concept and process family approaches are all based on the
concept of modular design. Modular design relies on the product
architecture and product platform concepts. Product architecture
is defined as a scheme where the physical components are linked.
Say for example modules that can be simply constructed on
memorial site such as the family tomb which can be manipulated
through adding each module every time someone in the family or
relative has been deceased.
BAGUIO CITY CEMETERY: A Neoteric Funerary Design Approach
of Sustainable Prefabricated Entombment

DELA PENA, JOED V.

LAWAGAN, AUGIE JONES D.

BANUSAN, ELVIS A.

THESIS

School of Engineering and Architecture

Department of Architecture

SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY

Baguio City 2600 Benguet

February 2020
 INTRODUCTION

Cemeteries are sacred spaces that have the ability to evoke peace,
fear, awareness, memories and other high emotions that transcend the space.
When one thinks of cemetery, it is often mystifying space embedded with the
eternal promise of death, an endpoint of life, ”a final resting place”. However this
landscape exists among the abiding city that is very much alive; creating a tension
between recording death, the landscape and the organisms of the city. Still, these
spaces are permanent green spaces within the urban environment-that occupy
sustainable community space (Hines, 2014).

Here in the Philippines, congested plots, informal settlers, vendors,

shanties are common sightings in our cemeteries. Public cemeteries are overly
crowded with unorganized graves that cause confusion to the families of the
deceased during mourning or visitation. Commotions during the celebration of
All-Saint’s Day became a norm for us Filipino that every year we should brace
ourselves to uncomfortable environments just to visit our passed love ones.
Pollution is also a concern in our public cemeteries. In the year 2015, there were
302 truckloads of garbage from 26 cemeteries in Metro Manila alone (Gamil,
2016).

Filipino still prefer the traditional burial to the ground despite the
growing trend of columbarium, mausoleum, memorial parks and the so-called
“apartment-type tombs”. Cemetery space is not an unlimited resource, plenty of
public cemeteries in the country reached their limits for accommodating the
deceased (Cruz, 2012).

As of 2019, the Philippines current population is 108, 335, 810

(United Nations Population Division, 2019). There are 1,731,289 live births which
is equivalent to 4,744 babies brought out to this world daily. And the number of
reported deaths have a 579, 237 in the year 2017 having the number of 1,587
people that die daily. In February 2018, Cordillera had registered 7,909 deaths, out
of this 4,611 were males and 3,298 were females (PSA, 2019).

Innovative Design approach is being considered world-wide. It’s

because traditional solutions are no longer held up to standard. According to the
Population Reference Bureau (2017), there are approximately 101 billion dead
people on earth with 7 billion more to join them within the next century. With the
dead far outnumbering the living, it’s not surprising that space at cemeteries has
become premium.
 Many European countries have been reusing graves for centuries.
In the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, when space runs out, a fresh layer of soil is
laid out on top of the existing graves to make room for new bodies. When the last
burial took place there in 1787, there were already twelve layers of graves stacked
on top of each other.

Norway isn’t alone in this. England is quickly running out of burial

plots, and one study calculated that if burials remain as popular in 2050 as is
today, the world will require 6,500 sq km—an area more than five times the size
of New York City.

So many countries are looking towards the sky rather than towards
the ground for a solution to their problem.

Asia is currently leading the trend in vertical cemeteries. In many

Asian cultures, there’s already a tradition of burying the dead in multi-storey
pagodas. This might have influenced the design of the high-rise pagoda-like
cemetery in Tainan, Taiwan, that goes by the name of the Lung Yen Life Service.
In Hong Kong, cemeteries are often built on hill slopes to save space. In Japan,
one businessman have even opened a hotel for the dead where bereaved families
can temporarily keep the dead bodies while they wait their turn in the queue for
one of the city's overworked crematoriums. Filipino still prefer the traditional
burial to the ground despite the growing trend of columbarium, mausoleum,
memorial parks and the so-called “apartment-type tombs”. Cemetery space is not
an unlimited resource, plenty of public cemeteries in the country reached their
limits for accommodating the deceased.

Filipino still prefer the traditional burial to the ground despite the
growing trend of columbarium, mausoleum, memorial parks and the so-called
“apartment-type tombs”. Cemetery space is not an unlimited resource, plenty of
public cemeteries in the country reached their limits for accommodating the
deceased.

Baguio City’s rapid growth in population is reciprocal to its

increased mortality rate, this is a direct factor to issue developments among the
cemeteries in the city. In 2015, the Cordillera Administrative Region Health
Profile listed 3.23 people of every thousand population dies annually. At this rate,
public cemeteries in Baguio City are in need of expansion and development.

This study will focus on finding ways to solve the problems faced
by our current public cemeteries, namely congestion, disorganization and
pollution. The study will collect relevant information in order to make an efficient
design for sustainable entombment.