Miró started to design Yarauvi, a floating city of the dead, during his graduate studies at Yale under his teacher Sorkin, who passed away from Covid-19 in March 2020.
Miró, who has since started his own practice in Texas, revisited the project in light of this loss.
As a place where people of all backgrounds and faiths could be laid to rest, Yarauvi could bring people together in collective grief and celebration, its architect suggested.
Miró Rivera Architects designed Yarauvi as a bowl-shaped structure that would be open to the sky, floating in the middle of the Dead Sea in Jordan and supported by a raft-like armature below the water line. The salinity of the lake would aide buoyancy.
Slim white struts would support the underside, while the inside would hold concentric rings of sarcophagi, stepped like an auditorium.
Yarauvi functions as a ceremonial labyrinth, where people would carry the body in its coffin up and into the open-air dish and place it facing towards the centre, before exiting and walking back downstairs to their boat.
