IE University students design a crematorium that pays its own power bill

May 16. IE University posted its spring design finals. One team designed a cemetery that runs its memorial spaces on energy recaptured from the cremation process itself. The heat that would otherwise vent becomes the building's power source.

The project treats the furnace as infrastructure, not metaphor. Cremation produces between 160 and 270 kWh per cycle. Most of that thermal output is vented. The IE team's proposal routes it through a heat exchanger that feeds a micro-turbine. The turbine powers the memorial hall, waiting rooms, and a small admin wing. Excess capacity stores in a thermal battery for off-peak hours. The drawings show a single-story volume with no windows on the furnace side and floor-to-ceiling glass facing a garden courtyard. The spatial logic is clear: mourners sit in daylight; the machinery stays out of sight.

The presentation includes load calculations for a facility serving a mid-sized town. The numbers close. A site processing 300 cremations annually produces enough surplus energy to offset 80% of its baseline grid demand. The remaining 20% pulls from solar panels on the roof. The system is net-zero over a calendar year.

The jazz collection

Another IE final: a fashion collection structured like a bebop set. The designer, whose name the school didn't publish, built each look as a riff on a single garment archetype. Look 1 is a trench coat. Look 2 deconstructs the same trench into a vest and separate sleeves. Look 3 reassembles the pieces in reverse order. The collection has seven looks. All derive from the same base pattern. The methodology is call-and-response, not seasonal narrative.

The fabric is untreated cotton canvas, dyed after construction. Each piece was sewn, worn for a week, then over-dyed to show the wear lines. The result reads like a score: the structure is fixed, the patina is improvised.

The Alice redesign

A third project reworks Alice in Wonderland as a codex with detachable inserts. Each chapter prints on a separate folio. Readers can reorder the story or remove chapters entirely. The binding is a clamshell box with interior slots. The type is set in Futura, which wasn't Carroll's choice but works here. The illustrations are new: black woodcuts, no color. The project treats the book as a modular object, not a fixed sequence.