Recompose | Seattle
Seattle, Washington
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Design Principal
Alan Maskin
Recompose|Seattle will be the first facility in the world to provide a sustainable option for after-death care. Designed in collaboration with Katrina Spade, founder and CEO of the Recompose public benefit corporation, the new facility will offer a service called “natural organic reduction” which converts human remains into soil, helping nourish new life after death – a third alternative to traditional burials and cremations that uses one-eighth the energy of cremation and saves over one metric ton of carbon dioxide per person.
The 18,500-square-foot facility located in Seattle’s SODO neighborhood carefully orchestrates the Recompose process, which is centered around a natural organic reduction vessel that transforms human remains into organic, nutrient-rich soil. The core of the Recompose|Seattle space is a modular system containing approximately 75 of these vessels, stacked and arranged to demarcate space for rituals and other types of public gatherings. Radiating from this ceremonial disposition area are spaces for shrouding (the storage and preparation of bodies), administrative back-of-house areas, and an interpretive public lobby which describes the Recompose process.
Katrina Spade first began working with Alan Maskin in 2015. In 2016, the Recompose team completed a Creative Exchange Residency at Olson Kundig where Spade and her team of architects and engineers designed the first prototype of the Recompose vessel.
I’ve been fascinated with Katrina Spade’s alternative burial concept since she shared it with me years ago, and Olson Kundig is honored to work closely with her team on the design of the first Recompose facility in the world.Alan Maskin, Design Principal
Team
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Design Principal
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Project Manager
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Project Architect
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Architectural Staff
Publications
2020
“6 In Case You Missed It…” The Architect’s Newspaper, Jan. 2020, 6. Print.
Ryder, Bethan. “A matter of life, death and compost.” The Observer Design, Winter 2020, 24. Print.
2019
Block, India. “Dezeen’s top 10 architecture trends of 2019.” Dezeen, 16 Dec. 2019. Web.
Kiley, Brendan. “Recompose, a composting alternative to burial and cremation, finds home in Sodo.” The Seattle Times, 19 Nov. 2019, A7, A9. Print.
Wood, Vincent. “World’s first human composting site to open.” The Independent, 9 Dec. 2019. Web.
Wood, Vincent. “World’s first human composting site to open.” Yahoo! News UK, 9 Dec. 2019. Web.