We've seen concept art for space-saving vertical necropoles and inverted Mexico City skyscrapers before — here's a design that combines the two.


The skyscraper necropolis of Mumbai Cemetery space is in short supply in dense metropolitan areas, so designers Yalin Fu & Ihsuan Lin… Read more


This is the Tower For The Dead, an 820-foot-deep subterranean complex built to conserve space and provide a burgeoning urban population with a place to bury their deceased. It has themed floors named after the five stages of grief, but does it have a food court?

This massive crypt — which was designed by Israel López Balan, Elsa Mendoza Andrés, and Moisés Adrián Hernández García — was submitted for Evolo's 2011 skyscraper competition. Like Orpheus, living visitors to the Tower must descend into the underworld. Via Evolo:

This project proposes an underground vertical cemetery for Mexico City – a vision that takes into consideration the overpopulation, the scarcity of land, and the psychological and sensory experience of grieving. The ‘Tower for the Dead' allows the family members of the deceased to be reborn, after a trip to the underworld, where they just buried their loved one.


Considerations of Mexico City's geological stability aside, it seems like a fairly practical solution to the space problems posed by huge graveyards. But by 2050, cemeteries will be an archaic notion anyway, as all the dead folks will just be uploaded into the Great Post-Synaptic Data Cloud, where the post-corporeal consciousness plays Snood and Zork for eternity.

[Via Inhabitat]