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DESIGN STATEMENT

A Highly Contagious Disease

New Resilience of Public Cemetery in Pondok Rangon

The current pandemic has highlighted many aspects in life; from social, cultural, spatial, territorial, even environmental, and so on. COVID-19 has taught us about how cities / neighbourhood / spaces need to plan, build and design differently in the future. In this case, we focused on housing proposal. But instead of designing house for living human being, we planned and designed house for the dead – in the time of pandemic: A Highly Contagious Disease – New Resilience of Public Cemetery in Pondok Rangon.

This New Resilience of Public Cemetery is designed as a district module that aim to be developed according to the needs and demands that are happening in the society. It may be applied in various site area as a prototype for national-scale future public cemetery; not only for COVID-19 but also other possible highly contagious disease.

We attempted to apply this proposal in Pondok Rangon that considered as an ideal site: located in high density area of Jakarta, has been set by government as public cemetery for COVID-19 patient; summarized some issues about dead and pandemic that have occurred in Indonesia:

1. New Normal at COVID-19;
   is a government policy for people to continue their normal activities (not lockdown) but with health protocols. By now, lack of protocol readiness impacts higher mortality rate and causes the higher demand of cemetery as well.

2. The majority of Indonesian culture which requires the dead body to be buried in the ground (no combustion process);
   some diseases in dead body can disappear through the combustion process, in any case it can be a shortcut, but can not be applied to every culture in Indonesia. The challenge is to make the ground-buried dead body easily decomposed.

3. Social stigma about COVID-19 patient and dead body;
   the pandemic has changed some people's social views regarding highly contagious diseases, which resulted in the rejection of COVID-19's dead bodies in several cemeteries. By way of well-designated cemetery, every cemetery can be convinced to receive and deliver them in a proper way, with a funeral procession that can be witnessed by loved ones.

4. The possibility of a similar outbreak in the future;
   although vaccines and drugs are being researched, it is possible that there will be other highly contagious disease in the future, therefore the development of district modules can be carried out based on sequences capacity planning.

These main issues became our architectural and technical concepts in designing and embracing this New Resilience of Public Cemetery, as the final housing of living human being; by reason of death is not the opposite of life, but a part of it.