• • In 1936 a sheltered and frustrated middle-aged divorcée from Chicago rather unexpectedly inherited the family fortune. Denied both school and university as a child by her parents (because she was a girl), she always wanted to do something with her life “of significant value to the community”, but it was not charity work she had in mind. Instead, Frances Glessner Lee, in best Miss Marple manner, became nothing less than “the mother of forensic investigation”.
    
    Inspired by a Boston medical examiner, George Burgess Magrath, who had complained to her of how murder investigations were often botched and ruined by inadequately trained detectives and coroners alike, Lee funded a Library of Legal Medicine at Harvard and the country’s first forensic pathology programme as well as becoming an expert in the field herself. She also created a series of miniature (1:12 scale) crime scenes by hand, with obsessive attention to detail, in order to test crime scene investigators’ powers of observation. Called the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death”, the 18 models she made in the 1940s are used to this day as teaching aids in the Maryland Medical Examiners’ office in Baltimore. I (sl)
    
    

    For more on the amazing Miss Lee and images of her mini crime scenes see our blog article Deathly Details and accompanying photographs from her biographer, the artist and photographer Corinne May Botz.

  Murder Most Marple

   

   

  In 1936 a sheltered and frustrated middle-aged divorcée from Chicago rather unexpectedly inherited the family fortune. Denied both school and university by her parents as a child (because she was a girl), she always wanted to do something with her life “of significant value to the community”, but it was not charity work she had in mind. Instead, Frances Glessner Lee, in best Miss Marple manner, became nothing less than “the mother of forensic investigation”.
  
  
  

  MORE

  Photo: Corinne May Botz

• COVER

  COVER

  Cover
• Table of contents

  Table of contents
• EDITORIAL

  EDITORIAL

  Editorial
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Memento Mei!

  The strange ternary work of Argentina’s Francisco Salamone

  Text: Rosario Talevi
• FOUND

  FOUND

  A Tomb with A View

  Le Corbusier’s Grave

  Text: Rob Wilson
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  Añorbe Cemetery Extension

  Navarra, Spain

  Text: George Kafka
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  Funerary Shelter

  Pardesiya, Israel

  Text: George Kafka
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Towers of Silence

  The Zoroastrian way of death

  Text: Sara Faezypour
• INTERVIEW

  INTERVIEW

  The Orientation of Hope

  An interview with Charles Jencks, co-founder of the Maggie’s Centres by Rob Wilson

  Text: Rob Wilson
• FOUND

  FOUND

  The London Necropolis Company

  A railway for the dead

  Text: George Kafka
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  Islamic Cemetery, Altach

  Vorarlberg, Austria

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  The Great Beyond

  Herbert Wright on architectures of the afterlife

  Text: Herbert Wright
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Murder Most Marple

  Pocket-sized crime scenes

  Text: Sophie Lovell
• CASE STUDY

  CASE STUDY

  The New Crematorium

  Stockholm, Sweden

  Text: Fiona Shipwright
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Where Ideas Go to Die

  The Palace of Failed Optimism

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Who Wants to Live Forever?

  Arakawa and Gins' Reversible Destiny Lofts by Léopold Lambert

  Text: Léopold Lambert
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Modernist Monsters

  An architecture horror classic

  Text: Florian Heilmeyer
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  Protestant Death Ethic

  Leon Berger’s Southampton Crematorium by Owen Hatherley

  Text: Owen Hatherley
• FOUND

  FOUND

  Saving Us From Ourselves

  The Golden Gate Bridge suicide barrier

  Text: George Kafka
• FREEHAND

  FREEHAND

  Freehand

  Luciano Scherer

  Text: Luciano Scherer
• FURTHER READING

  FURTHER READING

  Further Reading
• NEXT

  NEXT

  Next

  Storage
• ESSAY

  ESSAY

  THE SCENE AND THE PROTOCOL

  Athens and the opportunity for new urban strategies

  Text: Aristide Antonas

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Tumblr

Uncube is brandnew and wants to look good.
For best performance please update your browser.
Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer 10 (or higher), Safari, Chrome, Opera