FLW and the mortuary

 Of course I had to
“research” a good deal and that nearly got me down. I would come back
home, now and then, wondering if I felt as well as I should. But Nick
had a way of referring to the deceased always as “the merchandise,” and
that would cheer me up. I pulled through. . . .
This series of chapels (seating seventy-five to a hundred people), each
chapel with its own garden (all gardens in a garden) stands elevated upon
the mass of shale now composing the unique site. The plan of the whole
was an attempt to take some of the curse off the customary undertaker’s
official proceeding. I didn’t expect to make even the funeral of one’s
enemies exactly cheerful, but I did think I could give the obsequies some
beauty without destroying their integrity.
Here five simultaneous funerals may be so conducted that one is
- not too aware of another. All preparation and disposal of the deceased
is from down below in chambers independent of the ceremonial arrange-
ments for special mourners. The place of mourning for the families called
the “slumber room” caused most trouble, as the chief mourners do not
care to be seen, though they do want to see. And inasmuch as for some
time before the funeral the deceased must lie in a private room at their
convenience as mourners, the processes of one funeral immediately follow-
ing another, the proper allocation of this space became a major problem.
Here the synthesis is fairly complete and the business of the undertaker’s
funeral arrangements, choice of caskets, flowers, etc., is located in an inde-
pendent building at the entrance to the chapel yard . . . a colorful, happy
environment abundant with music . . . has been provided . . . the empha-
sis is here laid not on Death but on Life.1O
One readily detects in Wright’s words the pleasure—-the almost boyish
glee-—-that he took in working out a puzzle worthy of him. To keep five
totally immobile articles of “merchandise” from bumping into one another
as they rose and fell from the chambers below to the chambers above,
and to bestow on the mourning relatives of that merchandise the near-
miraculous capacity to see without being seen—! Only the supreme master
of three-dimensional thinking could have brought it off, and only a master
ironist (a peer of Waugh himself) would have dared to claim that in doing
so he had produced “a colorful, happy environment” in a veritable sea of
coffins and corpses. Alas, the cost of this necrophiliac fantasy proved too
much for Daphne’s purse; if it had been built, it would surely have rivaled
in popularity the Wee Kirk 0’ the Heather, in Forest Lawn Cemetery,
in Los Angeles, where happiness in the presence of the dead loved one is
the only emotion that one is expected to feel.