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7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, November 2, 2026
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Across history, some of the most ambitious monuments to death were never meant to be built—or never could be built. Designed on paper at impossible scales, these visionary tombs reveal how artists and architects grappled with mortality, memory, and the limits of civilization itself.
This lecture will explore a series of unrealized funerary projects from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when architects pushed monumentality to its conceptual extreme. We will examine Étienne-Louis Boullée’s vast spherical cenotaphs and cosmic mausolea, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s morally charged architecture of death and commemoration, and Thomas Willson’s astonishing proposal for a Great Pyramid of Death for London—a colossal solution to the city’s urban burial crisis, intended to contain the dead of generations.
Though never constructed, these designs functioned as philosophical objects: meditations on eternity, rational order, decay, and the fear that the dead might overwhelm the living. By tracing these unrealized tombs, we uncover how death shaped architectural imagination—and how the most powerful monuments sometimes exist only in the mind.
Brenda Edgar is an Art Historian in Louisville, KY. Her research interests include relics and reliquaries, medieval medical manuscripts and depictions of disease in medieval art, as well as the historical role of altered states of consciousness in the creation of art. In addition to her work for Morbid Anatomy, she teaches Art History courses at Indiana University Southeast. Her free monthly public talk series, “Art History Illustrated,” is presented at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. When she isn’t reading or writing, Brenda is a New York Times Crossword Puzzle addict as well as a yoga instructor.
7pm ET (NYC time)
Monday, November 2, 2026
PLEASE NOTE: A link to a recording of this talk will be sent out to ticket holders after its conclusion. It will also be archived for our Patreon members. Become a Member HERE.
Ticketholders: A Zoom invite is sent out two hours before the event to the email used at checkout. Please check your spam folder and if not received, email hello@morbidanayomy.org. A temporary streaming link will be emailed after the event concludes.
Across history, some of the most ambitious monuments to death were never meant to be built—or never could be built. Designed on paper at impossible scales, these visionary tombs reveal how artists and architects grappled with mortality, memory, and the limits of civilization itself.
This lecture will explore a series of unrealized funerary projects from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when architects pushed monumentality to its conceptual extreme. We will examine Étienne-Louis Boullée’s vast spherical cenotaphs and cosmic mausolea, Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s morally charged architecture of death and commemoration, and Thomas Willson’s astonishing proposal for a Great Pyramid of Death for London—a colossal solution to the city’s urban burial crisis, intended to contain the dead of generations.
Though never constructed, these designs functioned as philosophical objects: meditations on eternity, rational order, decay, and the fear that the dead might overwhelm the living. By tracing these unrealized tombs, we uncover how death shaped architectural imagination—and how the most powerful monuments sometimes exist only in the mind.
Brenda Edgar is an Art Historian in Louisville, KY. Her research interests include relics and reliquaries, medieval medical manuscripts and depictions of disease in medieval art, as well as the historical role of altered states of consciousness in the creation of art. In addition to her work for Morbid Anatomy, she teaches Art History courses at Indiana University Southeast. Her free monthly public talk series, “Art History Illustrated,” is presented at the Carnegie Center for Art and History in New Albany, Indiana. When she isn’t reading or writing, Brenda is a New York Times Crossword Puzzle addict as well as a yoga instructor.