As a child raised in western Idaho, I would road trip with my family to Yellowstone each summer, stopping to visit fish hatcheries along the way. The large tanks are each separated by maturity, progressing in size as you walk along the pavement. I’d watch fish big and small flounder as my father paused to explain each stage of life and their journey ahead once released, traveling miles through saltwater to their freshwater birthplace. The hatcheries were critical conservation efforts for endangered salmon species. I remember struggling to conceptualize the purpose of their lifelong journey: to die and become a part of a larger natural cycle.

Death is an intrinsically natural process, yet modern Western funeral practice bars it from being so. Graves set in metal and concrete and the conversion of our bodies to dust through cremation present physical barriers to natural transformation.

Katrina Spade, an architect by practice, founded her deathcare company Recompose with the intention of rethinking how humans can be integrated with nature after they die. Recompose is the world’s first human composting service created for urban settings. This specific process called Natural Organic Reduction, or NOR, was legalized in Washington in 2019, and is now legal in twelve subsequent states. 

Through Recompose, a body can transform into a cubic yard of soil over the course of two to four months, sequestering carbon rather than releasing it into the air as a pollutant, as is done with cremation. This process saves an estimated 1.4 metric tons of carbon per person, retaining valuable nutrients in an organic natural cycle. 

For Recompose, design performs best when directly informed by nature. Moments of ritual and connection are created to directly mirror natural cycles. 

Raised in rural New Hampshire, Spade moved to Vermont with her young family to caretake for her grandparents, who could no longer live alone in their home. She enrolled in Yestermorrow, a local design-build school, and felt motivated by the school’s focus on natural building materials and its empowerment of architects to pursue a tactile approach in their work. Spade noted their relevant tagline, “Build with your hands.” 

Katrina pursued her Master of Architecture at UMass Amherst, where she began contemplating methods of sustainable deathcare and how design can inform this practice. She fell in love with the idea of natural burial, a common deathcare practice in rural regions, involving laying the deceased to rest in a field or sprawling natural space. The biggest hurdle with natural burial in cities is that space is limited, but as Spade noted, “there is lots of plant life to be nourished,” and we shouldn’t have to leave the cities we love after we die. Katrina’s “Urban Death Project” was formed as a thesis project and early phase of Recompose, the name aptly describing the company’s intention: bringing nature, and a more general embrace of death, to our cities. 

Her background in architecture, combined with an undergraduate degree in anthropology, helped Katrina envision a vehicle for sustainable deathcare while rethinking the preexisting funeral system.

Researching the American funeral industry in her free time, Spade sensed an “overriding draining of any agency that the family [of the deceased] might have, when in fact each of us has the capacity to be with the dead body of the person we love.” 

Before founding her company, Spade held home funerals and natural burials for multiple family members, noting the honor of “being able to care for their bodies.” Autonomy and consideration of grieving individuals are threads of Recompose, largely inspired by Spade’s personal experience.

While researching composting methods, Katrina looked to farming. Livestock mortality composting offered a promising model, as farmers would place an animal in a field with a mixture of hay and additional plant life that help break down the body. This process, however, requires acreage and time, taking up to a year for the animal to fully decompose.

Postgrad, Spade moved to Seattle, determined to actualize her vision through design. Early into her move, she was introduced to Alan Maskin, an owner and principal of architecture firm Olson Kundig.

“[Alan was] interested in the same things I was,” Spade said, “which is, how do you bring ritual into this new deathcare option?” Alan noted that he had always been taken by the Buddhist notion of impermanence, and he was interested in its relation and complication by Katrina’s proposal of a new kind of permanence after death: not memorialized by a gravestone, but embedded within the forest floor. He added, “Katrina wanted to change the way we think about death, and the fact that we don’t talk about it, we don’t deal with it.” Their partnership seemed kismet.

As a “test pilot” of Olson Kundig’s visiting residency program, Katrina, Alan, and his collaborative partner Blair Payson worked in tandem to create the Recompose composting vessel—a hexagonal rotating pod filled with a mixture of wood chips, alfalfa, and straw, informed by Spade’s studies of the farming industry. Recompose’s composting pods are hexagons for efficiency purposes, as composting in the middle of a city requires space maximization. But stacked together, the pods form a beehive-like structure. Natural form continued to shape Recompose’s design.

In 2019, after the composting process received legal status in the state of Washington,  Katrina reconnected with Olson Kundig to design Recompose’s flagship facility in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood. The facility opened its doors in August of 2020.

The team started to ideate how the design could provide comfort to grieving visitors, especially when the process itself was so new.

At Recompose, grieving families may partake in a “laying in” ceremony, an alternative funeral where they can play music, say words to the departed, and spend time in their company. Recompose’s ceremony space is positioned alongside the greenhouse, where the hive of vessels create soil. Alan ideated the moment of transition from ceremony to facility, calling it the “threshold vessel,” a unique composting system designated for ceremonies. At the end of service, the vessel is moved through a circular portal in the wall and into the greenhouse space as a final gesture, sending the deceased to transform. The vessel features an engraved interior poem for the deceased, written by a member of Spade’s team—the kind of consideration that has made a concept as initially abstract as Recompose feel grounded and intentional.

“Much like the cycle the body goes through in the Recompose process, there is a cycle that the visitors go through, where they’re continually reminded in subtle ways of what their loved one will become,” Maskin said.

The building’s exterior presents a natural mural, a near exact depiction of Recompose’s product: soil and plant life, surrounded by a garden that partially utilizes donated soil from their vessels. Inside, slot windows glazed green and yellow filter light through the building as though you’re immersed in a forest—Alan’s idea after spending time in the forests of Port Townsend on the Olympic Peninsula. 

Direct translations of natural phenomena to Recompose’s design were intentional. “[Alan] and I shared the opinion that being pretty direct with the design is important when you’re dealing with something so raw and potentially heart wrenching as someone's death,” Spade said. 

She noted, “When someone is grieving and walking into the space for the first time, they don’t need extra things to ponder. They don’t need to wonder what the design is supposed to symbolize.” The building’s design is intended to comfort through its forwardness.

Transparency, as a consideration for both the deceased and grieving visitors, is embedded in Recompose’s process and design. 

Katrina felt it was important to offer a space in their facility, named Cedar, for loved ones to bathe and care for the deceased. “From the sink to the botanicals to the hairbrush, it’s really made to be a place where family and friends can take some extra time with the person's body,” Spade said. 

Spade felt that providing the opportunity for ritual was meaningful in itself; clients have the option to donate their soil to a partnered land trust, or Recompose can provide loved ones with the compost to distribute at their own pace. It’s this opportunity for ritual, in ceremony and post-compost, that makes Recompose unique. Sometimes, as Spade mentioned, “it’s nice to have someone else do that work [of deathcare]. But at the same time, what’s lost when you make that a hyper-professionalized process?” About 40 percent of people who use Recompose’s services partake in some form of ceremony. “The offering of it is key” to helping their clients and families feel supported, Katrina said.

“I do think it is a bit of a gift to have a ceremony when it’s extremely raw, and then come back to us or receive the soil from us two months later,” Spade said. “For many people, that’s a moment where they can re-remember their person, or do something with that soil that becomes their own ritual, and we might not make the time for that otherwise.”

Recompose provides the framework to think of ourselves, one day, becoming an embedded material factor of not only the city but the parts we love most: parks, green spaces, and gardens. 

One of Katrina’s favorite client stories is from a family who brought a whole cubic yard of their loved one’s soil back to his home in the city. They not only spread the compost in his garden, which he had tended to his whole life, but they also planted out the parking strip with the soil, and neighbors came by with buckets to bring it home.

If a client alternatively opts for soil donation, the Recompose Land Program offers their soil to larger conservation efforts in Washington. The Skagit Land Trust, a partner of the Recompose Land Program, is primarily volunteer led, stewarding and cultivating our most at-risk ecosystems. A large part of this effort has included sequestering carbon within nutrient-deficient land. The Trust shared that the Skagit River is slowly returning to the natural conditions that once supported salmon runs. 

I was reunited with salmon at Seattle’s Ballard Locks last summer, watching them jump up a ladder on the final leg of their Cedar River journey. The ladder, situated in a beautiful public waterfront park with a British botanical garden, is designed to mimic the salmon’s natural patterns, serving as an aid to transport them on their journey toward end of life. With Recompose, we can partake in the cycle, providing one last carbon exhale into the soil—nature has already laid out the blueprint to do so.

“There’s something so ethereal about our spirits going to another place, no matter how you interpret that. There is something about the spirit’s last move, to do something really positive that could have a tremendous effect on generations ahead,” Maskin said. 

‍