The Architecture Foundation (AF) presents a series of three spectacular events exploring loss and resurrection staged in and around a temporary mausoleum designed by Sam Jacob Studio in Highgate Cemetery. Good Grief series will start on Wednesday, September 14 and continue until September 16.

2016 has not been a year for the faint-hearted. Celebrity deaths, attempted coups, a nation divided by its future, the looming spectres of isis in the East and Trump in the West: the horsemen of the apocalypse are out of the gates and bearing down on us fast.

But do not be afraid of the dark. Dust off your existential dread and set sail over the river Styx to join the Architecture foundation for a new series of evening events grappling with grief. In the dying light of September evenings, the Architecture Foundation will gather for a programme of three events rolling away the stone on the recent loss (and potential resurrection) of projects, people and ideas.

Adolf Loos's Mausoleum for Max Dvorák (1921). Image courtesy of AF

Good Grief will be staged in and around a specially-created pavilion designed by Sam Jacob Studio entitled 'A Very Small Part of Architecture', itself a resurrection of Adolf Loos’ unbuilt tomb for Max Dvorak. Loss is perhaps the hardest thing to communicate through architecture. in this pavilion, a ghost of a building that never lived, Sam Jacob Studio creates a vehicle for travelling to the netherworld and back.

Join the conversation in the graveyard of ideas...

Good Grief 

Date: September 14, 2016 @7pm

Venue: Highgate Cemetery, Swain's Lane, London N6 6QX.

Tickets: £10

Good Grief is a collaboration between the Architecture Foundation, Sam Jacob Studio, Mushpit and Highgate Cemetery.

The other 3 events are lined up here: 

Continental Drift: The Death of the European Dream? / 14 September, @7pm

Tackling the ramifications of the recent referendum. What role could architecture have played in representing the EU and how can it now give expression to a post-Brexit Britain? What could an independent London city-state mean for the urbanism and economy of UK? Is Brexit a loss to Britain’s architecture or an unprecedented opportunity to conceive new models, methods and identities?

Speakers: 

Jack Self, Writer and Editor-in-Chief of the Real Review

Carlos Maria Romero & Santiago Latorre, Performance Artists

Patrik Schumacher, Director of Zaha Hadid Architects

Vicky Richardson, Writer and Curator

Adrian Lahoud, Dean of the Royal College of Art

Martha Rawlinson, Architect

Charles Saumarez Smith CBE, Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Arts 

Julia King, Architectural Designer and Urban Researcher at LSE Cities

Irénée Scalbert, Writer and Architectural Critic

Steve Webb, Co-Founder of Webb Yates Engineers

Afterlife: Zaha Hadid / 15 September, @7pm

Zaha Hadid’s sudden absence offers a challenge to her followers and combatants alike. What aspects of her work are relevant to architecture’s future? How has her cultural prominence impacted on the generation that has grown up in her shadow? Could our current professional culture produce a talent of comparable originality and influence?

Forget About It: Too many memorials? / 16 September, @7pm

Our yearning to mark collective loss may have encrusted London with monuments to an ever-growing number of victims but has this proliferation undermined our sense of what is sacred? This debate asks whether our culture of rampant memorialisation is sustainable or healthy. Can a city remember too much? Have we hit ‘peak memorial’ and if not when will we?

Top image: Sam Jacob Studio's A Very Small Part of Architecture (2016), courtesy of Sam Jacob

> via The Architecture Foundation