In Passing

Abstract

Funerary sites are places where memory, grief, and time become materially and spatially present. Yet many of these places are increasingly organized through measurable time. Ceremonies are scheduled, graves are leased, and places of farewell are often only encountered at the moment of death rather than throughout life. The experience of farewell and remembrance, however, unfolds through another register of time: not time as seconds, minutes, and hours that can be kept, managed, or run out of, but through duration, return, and moments of unexpected recollection. These two processes—the material and the immaterial—within the act of farewell, each existing within a different experience of time, reveal a tension in present-day funerary practices.

This tension has increased as secularization has shifted funerary sites from collective devotional landscapes into fragmented mosaics of individual lives, creating a spatial condition in which remembrance becomes dependent on individual responsibility and financial means, rather than existing as a temporal process shared by all human beings. A misalignment arises between the temporal nature of life and death and their spatial and material expression in funerary sites, undermining architecture’s capacity to transform matter into meaning and to accommodate the evolving and transient realities of both life and death.
Following Henri Bergson’s distinction between measurable time and lived duration, and drawing on Joke Hermsen’s plea for a renewed sensitivity to inner time, this project approaches this misalignment through Time, not as a quantity, but as a qualitative condition through which life and death are experienced.

The Schoorlse Duinen provide a landscape in which transience is already materially present. Shaped by wind, water, fire, and centuries of human intervention, the site reveals an ongoing negotiation between permanence and change. Within this dynamic environment, architecture is understood as a threshold where the two processes of farewell, each unfolding through a different experience of time, converge for a moment, grounding the fleetingness of cremation and the act of saying farewell. Rather than treating remembrance as a fixed act attached to permanent monuments, the project explores remembrance through the act of walking, embedded within landscape, movement, and material.

By positioning Time as a qualitative design medium, In Passing reconnects architecture to the relationship between human and humus, memory and landscape, life and death. Rather than seeking to resolve the tension between measurable and lived time, it creates a spatial and material framework in which remembrance can unfold through movement, return, and change. It asks what remains after loss and invites visitors to engage with the experiential qualities of time—weathering, movement, and transition. It situates remembrance within a landscape that, like memory itself, is never fixed and always in passing.