Vince van Boxtel

A place that offers the possibility for a peaceful death, at a moment chosen by the person themselves. This has been the design brief explored and articulated in this study.

What might such a place look like?

At a time when the number of older people living with dementia is steadily increasing, when people live longer yet also face growing psychological distress, and when the demand for a voluntary end-of-life option is rising, no existing framework or dedicated place has yet been developed to support those who seek it.

Émile Durkheim describes four forms of suicide in his book On Suicide (1897): anomic, egoistic, altruistic and fatalistic. Each relates to the relationship between the individual and society. In this report, I introduce a fifth and final form: Balance - a situation in which interests are weighed and a deliberate decision is made to end what is perceived as a ‘completed life’.

Based on these five forms, a building has been conceived that is accessible to everyone and capable of accommodating all these forms of suicide.

The preliminary research for this report shows that a funeral holds a different meaning and takes a different form for every individual. The same applies to the act of leave-taking when choosing to end one’s life. By drawing on universal human experiences and offering multiple possibilities for dying, this project seeks to address as broad an audience as possible.

The Pier in Scheveningen presents itself as the ideal location for this design task. It is a structure that extends from the land towards the horizon, a building approaching the end of its own life. It is widely recognisable—an icon, a place situated at the heart of everyday life.

The pier is also a space created purely for human leisure. This stands in sharp contrast to contemporary attitudes towards death, which we prefer to keep as far removed from inhabited areas as possible—hidden deep in forests, so that no one need be confronted with their own mortality. Yet these two realms, life and death, should exist side by side; neither can exist without the other. A place for dying next to a place for living, but also a place for farewell.

This building—read as the combination of a helix and a cone—creates space for precisely this. It is constructed from long black bricks resting on a foundation of pigmented concrete, supported by black basalt blocks in the sea and crowned with a gold-coloured cap. Positioned just a few metres beyond the end of the Scheveningen Pier, it appears to visually extend the pier towards the horizon.

Its skin is partly open and partly closed, offering spaces in which one can be seen and places that provide shelter. A Foucauldian heterotopia—an ultimate in-between space, a spatie.