It's like walking from Demeter's green hills into the cooler depths of...not Hades...but maybe a middle ground...but not purgatory either:)

I'm talking about the Columbarium at Pere Lachaise, which is also connected to the beautifully domed crematorium. Your sense of sight and smell and general perception shifts. When you descend into its subterranean level, everything is hazy at first, but then you notice it's cooler down here and darker and in a strange way, musty. I doubt it's the smell of ashes...I guess it's the smell of many, lived through lives co-mingling with the thoughts of their loved ones. There are placards and engravings for "my little daughter" or "my beloved."

I've made some French friends here with knowledge of the cemetary, and they all say I must come during All Saint's Day. It's said the entire Columbarium is coated, covered with a bedding of flowers...and there's a queue to enter Pere Lachaise.

Imagine that...a city of the living and dead.

Ding ding

Every day in almost all, if not every one, of the gated cemeteries of Paris, there is a time when the guards walk the widest boulevards and ring large, hand held tea bells.

They elicit a ding that echoes into shaded corners and between statuesque memorials. The familiar sound is one I regret but do not disavow when the guards especially call out my way.

On the one hand, the romantic, archeologist in me loves the noise. These bells signal a formality, a familiarity, a plodding record of time that, for the evening, this place is closed. It often reminds me of medieval cities, once walled and also walled off for the evening by some sort of ringing reminder. In Chinese towns and cities of yesteryear, there were also night clock men, who walked the town ringing a bell at each hour of the night. And I am a jealous sketcher--wanting to eke out every last moment with those residing in Pere Lachaise. But when the doors of one of the 5 gates closes, and I look back, I see green canopies over the gates and the sun. It's summertime in Paris, where the sunset is around 9:30pm. I realize that those who reside in Pere Lachaise might well be heaving a sigh of peace, that at last they can rest in peace for the remainder of the day--away from the 1 million visitors that stream through each year.

But I also feel that gated walls separate as much as they protect. In a necropolis like Pere Lachaise, nestled amidst the bosom of Paris and very well sharing party walls with city apartments, there could be so much more. So much more.

Les Cimetieres de Paris

Through visits to Cimitieres de Montmartre, Montparnasse and Pere Lachaise...a veritable jaunt through history, archaeology and architecture. It's a constant reminder of surreality when one looks around and sees the names and feels the presence of those who but slumber in the Earth's bosom.

Cimitieres Montmartre, in particular, is keenly juxtaposed in an urban context. There is a steel bridge that runs atop of the actual site conveying cars and pedestrians alike--the closest connector between Paris, il cite, and the cemetery that I've seen yet.


At Pere Lachaise, access to a large swath of its Eastern wall has been cut off by residential and commercial buildings that abut the very wall itself. Nary a site-line comes into view across the cemetery wall without seeing the drying laundry of a Pariesien hanging from a window above the wall...or viewing the actual wall through the lens of a glass partition--the window of a furniture store. So close...yet so far...Parisien furniture store owners don't like photographers in their store.

multi-chromaticity. transparency.opacity

final review images from my 2nd semester glass paradoxes course with group mates sunmi moon, james perakis and chris oesterling at uva.

we created a lexsand (plexi glass), 3m multi-chromatic sheeting, and yupo facade that derived from initial origami studies. tools used: laser cutter, needle and plastic thread, and a whole lot of hand power and brain power and corporate largess.

our instructor: rosana rubio-hernandez