M: The Magnetic Mausoleum
In my studies and trying to decipher whenever or not the Free City of Jubylon actually existed or not, I have come across what is either the most clever forgery I have ever seen or an actual blueprint of a building. In this case, a mausoleum designed to function via electromagnetism and hydraulics.
The layout is fairly simple. The building was supposedly square with a circular room in the middle of the east-west axis and towards the northern side of the building.
Besides that room, there were two square rooms at the eastern and western edge of the mausoleum. The rest of the building was dominated by huge walls, where iron caskets would be stored with a few passages to enable maintenance and repair work more easily. The whole building was covered with reliefs and paintings of wild and mostly empty landscapes. A list of everyone ever put to rest there was chiselled into an ever expanding white waist-height wall that ran from the mausoleum and into the park. From a drawing found along with the blueprint, everything seems to have been done in the Art Nouveau typically associated with the Free City of Jubylon.
The simple philosophy behind the mausoleum was to keep the buried in a dry and mummified state, slowly allowing them to loose fluids, until they naturally collapsed into powder. At the time, this was at considered the most efficient way to prevent diseases from spreading from the deceased. The government had the building commissioned shortly after taking power with specially designed coffins as well.
The idea was to have a secular place of remembrance and mourning for the living to remember and weep for the dead. The doctors in case of the building took it a step further however. The coffins would be placed inside a wall and then (in quite a feat of of combined hydraulics and electromagnetic engineering) would be transported around, in a seemingly random pattern, so that people would not know where exactly in the mausoleum that their loved ones had been buried. That way, it was meant to encourage quiet walks in the mausoleum and the park outside. In short, it was a way of prescribing natural beauty, quiet, art and time as the best medicines against grief.
One small detail did not escape my notice from the blueprint. Namely, what eventually happened to the dead when they had been dried out into powder. Obviously, the doctors in charge of the construction were not squeamish around corpses. So they had designed for the powdered remains to be used as fertiliser and transferred into the soil of the lush park around the mausoleum. The dead thereby helping those left behind deal with and live on through their grief.