There are few places more charming to bathe in liquid nitrogen for eternity than Rafz, Switzerland. Tucked up against railroad tracks in the alpine town (population: 4,766), a nondescript white building hovers over a subterranean storage facility for cryopreserved bodies. The facility, run by the nonprofit European Biostasis Foundation, is one of only about a half-dozen such organizations in the world engaged in the sci-fi work of freezing bodies at negative 185 degrees Celsius in the faint hope that medical advances will one day lead to resurrection.
While sub-zero suspension, and the space-age visions it churns up, remains a niche choice, an upper stratum of the contemporary elite has soured on preparing for death, investing in longevity research instead of tombs. From ancient pyramids to modernist mausoleums, designing for death has long been an obsession of the rich and mighty. What happens when the one percent seems more interested in maximizing their own lifespan than investing in what they leave behind?
In the long and storied tradition of death architecture, “interment” at the cryopreservation facility in Rafz is scientifically advanced but aesthetically banal: steel vats, tubes, probes, and all-around bleak lab-rat vibes. Whether you view the below-zero work of the foundation as the elite future of sepulchral design or plain quackery depends on your philosophical perspective—and your wallet. Full-body cryopreservation with Tomorrow Bio, the affiliated for-profit company, runs up a bill starting at €200,000. If you’re cash-strapped, just settle for preserving the most important part: your brain. That will be €75,000, danke.
Witnessing the European Biostasis Foundation facility, a sort of transhumanist graveyard, reveals a tragedy of cultural imagination. From Memphis to Rome to contemporary burial grounds the world over, designing spaces for death has been a boundless motivator of artistic expression. Ashes to ashes, sure, but at least surround our powdery remains with the beauty of marble angels and chiseled alcoves? When I ask Dr. Emil Kendziorra, CEO and co-founder of Tomorrow Bio, about this tension, he disagrees with the premise. “Cryopreservation is the furthest thing away from burial. In fact, burial would be the worst thing that could happen to my clientele.” His mortality opposed market prefers the sanitized glint of an exam room where functionality reigns. “People choose cryopreservation like they do a medical treatment,” he says. “It’s a totally different value proposition: an informed scientific choice, more than an emotional choice tied to aesthetics.”
Deemed dead by state coroners, the cryopreserved hold out hope for revival. In theory, this leaves little need for sentimentality, ritual, or ornament. It does, however, require estate planning: Like the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the Alcor Life Extension Foundation—the Maserati of U.S.-based cryopreservation organizations—will store your “memory box” in a salt mine in Kansas.
The capsules contain precious goods, from diaries to diamond rings, that high-paying customers will want on hand when their distant “second lives” begin. Alcor is headquartered in a windowless stucco building surrounded by palm trees and parking lots in Scottsdale, Arizona. It’s hard to imagine Paris Hilton (net worth: $400 million) or Peter Thiel (net worth: $31.9 billion) walking through the door, yet here lies their expensive fate. Both are allegedly prepaying customers.
Beyond cryopreservation, Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman each have hundreds of millions tied up in life-extension biotech firms. States are investing, too. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is the chief backer of the Hevolution Foundation, a Riyadh-based nonprofit “dedicated to extending healthy human lifespan and advancing the science of aging.” At a summit in Beijing last year, a hot mic caught Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping—authoritarians without guardrails or term limits—chummily discussing organ replacement as a road to longer living. At least the despots of the past died, and often young. Ours is a vampiric age.
I live in Paris, and one of my favorite places to read in the city is Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. I appreciate it less as a religious site than as a triumph of death urbanism in the West.
Opened in 1804, then outside the city’s borders, it was the first “garden cemetery” in Paris. Though it is a paragon of 19th-century Romanticism, with its cobbled dead-end footpaths, willow trees, and decaying funerary art, its origins were no more sentimental than the vats at Rafz. As churchyards across the insalubrious 18th-century city filled up with the dead, authorities grasped for a solution: Starting in the 1780s, abandoned quarries to the south of Paris were crammed with the remains of an estimated 6 million people, a millennium of souls exhumed and relocated.
Open carts filled with bones and soil crisscrossed the landscape day after day, transferring the deceased to their new resting place. Above the entrance to the Paris Catacombs, an inscription still reads: Arrête! C’est ici l’empire de la Mort. An Enlightenment-coded bid for more real estate and public health imperatives created, by accident, the gothic netherworld that would inspire many artists, writings, and vagabonds of the Romantic era. Less than a century after its establishment, 19th-century elite would come to view an ornamental sepulcher in Père-Lachaise, or the Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, or Monumentale in Milan, as the bucolic status symbol du jour.
Wending my way through the dense rows of tombstones and phone-booth-esque familial shrines at Père-Lachaise a few weeks ago, I was struck by how many of its most arresting design touches are not the Neo-Gothic stone carvings or poetic inscriptions discussed in guidebooks and on placards. Far more interesting were the temporary symbols of ongoing devotion, the tacky bits: plastic hearts and withered flowers, colorful ceramic crosses and fading photographs curling in on themselves. Day-old lipstick on the plexiglass installed around Oscar Wilde’s modernist tomb, or a mountain of fresh flowers for a Kurdish singer I’d never heard of. A cemetery like Père-Lachaise is not merely a disposing place for bodies, but an experiment in symbolic immortality (not the techno-futurists’ farcical attempt at the literal kind). Here, private death becomes public object.
Philippe Ariès, a pioneer of French cultural studies and expert on mortuary history, theorized that the history of attitudes toward death is also the history of the discovery of the individual (in 1974’s Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present). As Western society edges toward ever more extreme forms of individualism, with Silicon Valley at its helm, death and how we design memorials for it become the prerogative of the to-die, rather than communal rites and sites for posterity.
If cryopreservation represents the ultimate me-me hubris, new green burial trends similarly leave little for future generations to contemplate. Memorial forests delicately space bodies across the forest floor, banning physical monuments as a matter of policy and principle. Or consider “Natural Organic Reduction,” the euphemistic term for human composting. Katrina Spade, founder of Seattle-based Recompose—the world’s first company to offer legal human composting since 2019—originally proposed the Urban Death Project, a communal system in which bodies would be placed sequentially into a large vertical composting core inside a multistory building, producing finished soil at the bottom. When the communal body-vat proved difficult to market, she pivoted to Recompose’s current system of individual hexagonal “recomposition” vessels. Mass graves, though more efficient, lack mass appeal.
In Genesis, when God told Adam, “dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return,” he had a very real point. As a design object, the human composting pods—eight-by-four-foot stainless steel vessels filled with wood chips, alfalfa, straw, and your loved one’s body—come closer to this biblical maxim than most. As much could be said about memorial forests, where one’s body organically decays into the ground: a poetic choice, both spiritually and environmentally (and likely my own dying wish). These days, interment in a gaudy cemetery like Père-Lachaise feels over-the-top and out-of-touch, while cryopreservation, on the other extreme, seems like a foolhardy rejection of the (very real) premise. For secular-minded Western liberals, eco-burial presents itself like a culturally astute solution (though, of course, commonplace in other cultures worldwide). Cheap, “alternative,” guilt-free.
Yet the throngs of multinational tourists shuffling through the gates of Père-Lachaise each morning are not there for bodies—they’re filing in for a history lesson. They, like me, seek a physical communion with the past that a leaf-strewn forest floor won’t quite replicate, and which an unvisitable nitrogen-filled vat certainly can’t. More than vampires, we are historians. As a field of monuments, a cemetery accepts biological death while resisting a social one. In a moment of fraying social bonds, these carved stones are a collective gift to the art of not forgetting, and therefore, to everlasting life.
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