Space and Culture: Quarantine

The dead, not unlike the sick, are historically quarantined from the space of the living. Spatial separation is a constituent of civilization and this is epitomized by an architectural and urban separation, indeed division, between the space of the dead and the space of the living. Cemeteries are historically located on the periphery, quartered off by a clearly demarcated boundary, or in a separate site altogether as it is called, the City of the Dead. Architecture manifests a clarity of distinction between the living and the dead as spatially distinct building block of civilization. Yet we know this cannot be the whole story. This paper will draw on the death drive from psychoanalytic theory to discuss an architecture of quarantine.