Henry Kuehn on Architect Memorial Sites at Graceland Cemetery

While Goff’s gravestone, through its shape and material, references his organic modernist work, many of the sites in Kuehn’s book are indistinct, plain, or sometimes nonexistent. Charles and Ray Eames, for example, have no individual markers at their family plot in St. Louis; Philip Johnson’s ashes were scattered at a rose garden across from his Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. By concentrating on the graves of architects, Kuehn is considering what people who dedicated their careers to design chose as their own final statements. “It seems strange that these great architects, who created landmark structures during their lives, put so little thought into how they would be memorialized for time eternal,” Kuehn writes in a preface. “Apparently most of these architectural giants, like most of us ordinary people, either did not feel like dealing with death or felt that a lasting memorial for them was not important.” ...  Goff is one of over 200 architects whose posthumous fates are featured in Henry H. Kuehn’s Architects’ Gravesites: A Serendipitous Guide. The compendium of tombs, recently published by the MIT Press, was initially self-published in a smaller edition as a passion project by the retired medical industry executive. Although it includes some international names, the focus is on architects who had an influence in the United States, with Kuehn’s own photographs included above brief descriptions of their lives and deaths.