Adapted Traditions
Franklin Park, Boston, Massachusetts
Harvard University Graduate School of Design
Harvard GSD ASLA Student Award Project Nominee (2022)
Advised by Francesca Benedetto
Adapted Traditions reimagines the cemetery as a shared landscape of burial, remembrance and ecological regeneration within Boston's historic Franklin Park. Drawing upon the spatial traditions of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish burial practices, the project explores how orientation, procession, enclosure and vegetation can establish distinct spaces of spiritual reflection within a common landscape. Rather than separating religious traditions into prescribed territories, the proposal adapts their spatial and symbolic principles to create a cemetery shaped by the relationship between cultural rituals, landscape and ecological succession.
The design is organised around a continuous forested path, woven through existing clusters of mature and young trees. Building upon Frederick Law Olmsted's historic woodland typology, the proposal strengthens and diversifies the park's oak canopy through the introduction of native species, including Bur Oak, White Oak, Swamp White Oak and Willow Oak. This densified woodland establishes a shared spatial framework, within which clearings and burial gardens emerge through subtle changes in planting, topography and orientation. The path becomes both a physical procession and a symbolic expression of tradition, connecting otherwise distinct spaces through a common experience of movement and enclosure.
Within this framework, the orientation of burial plots, the geometry of intersecting axes and the arrangement of vegetation establish different spatial identities. Burial spaces are carefully aligned to accommodate religious customs, while remaining open to multiple communities and forms of remembrance. Layered understory planting creates intimate environments defined by seasonal colour, fragrance, texture and varying degrees of visibility. Inspired by the atmospheric and symbolic representation of gardens in Islamic miniature paintings, native plant communities are composed to evoke distinct sensory experiences, allowing the landscape itself to become a medium of spiritual reflection.
The materiality of the central path further articulates the transition between collective and intimate spaces. White stone slabs gradually fragment into crushed stone and fine gravel, dissolving the formal procession into smaller paths and enclosed burial clearings. This progressive transformation of material and scale expresses tradition as something neither fixed nor abandoned, but continuously adapted through movement and occupation.
Natural burial practices are integrated within these planted clearings, allowing the decomposition of the body to contribute to soil regeneration and the development of a diverse forest understory. As vegetation matures and changes with the seasons, the boundaries between burial spaces and the surrounding woodland shift, creating an evolving relationship between privacy, collective memory and ecological renewal.
Through the careful orchestration of paths, axes, orientations, materials and vegetation, Adapted Traditions proposes a cemetery in which cultural rituals are translated into spatial and ecological experiences. The project understands tradition not as a fixed set of inherited forms, but as a living framework capable of adaptation, where landscapes of remembrance are continually reshaped through the passage of time, the growth of the forest and the rituals of those who inhabit it.