Yarauvi is a conceptual nondenominational burial place, re-released by Miró Rivera Architects as founder Juan Miró mourned the death of his tutor, professor Michael Sorkin, from coronavirus.
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 the world grapples with the staggering death toll of Covid-19, Yarauvi is a timely reminder that death is a part of humanity that architecture should embrace rather than avoid," said Miró.
"At the same time, the message of tolerance and reconciliation that Yarauvi represents is critical as the world seeks to take action in the face of widespread, systemic injustice and inequality." 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.

Mourners would gather on the shore of the Dead Sea befor...