Beyond Dying Bodies: Fragility Passing Through Processes

Abstract

This article explores fragility as a lens for the design process, drawing on informal practices that imagine care scenarios. It focuses on architectural bodies at the end of their lifecycle, exploring them as new sites for architecture. The concept of fragility as a circular transition between life and death is explored through two intertwined case studies. The first is Brent Green’s movie Gravity Was Everywhere Back Then, which depicts the DIY construction of Leonard Wood’s house meant to heal his terminally ill wife, Mary. The second is Likbodsprojektet by architect Erika Henriksson, which involves a collective conversion of a mortuary room into a wooden contemplation chamber as an act of care. Fragility is a paradigm emerging from scarcity and an opportunity for reinvention, as the comparison of these cases reveals. This controversial process nurtures relationships between bodies and waste landscapes while navigating constraints: being broke in a broken world.