Space for Sorrow – Integration of a Place for Mourning into the Urban Life of Graz

Even though collective mourning is once again socially acceptable and can be publicly expressed, individual grief remains isolated in the private sphere and hardly finds a place in everyday life and professional settings. The localization of mourning places on the outskirts of the city reflects the tendency to displace mourning from the urban living space. Processes of individualization, pluralization, secularization and globalization contribute to changes in the culture of mourning. Traditional places of mourning in the form of burial sites no longer meet the needs of modern and mobile urban society. The design task of this master's thesis is to develop an approach for a trans-religious place for mourning at Lendplatz in Graz, detached from places of burial, and to integrate it into the urban space.