EUTHANASIA COASTER

This is a really interesting project by designer Julijonas Urbonas. He has been a background in the field of amusement park development that includes a tenure as a managing director of a Lithuanian Theme Park. His current work, influenced by his interested, is self-classified as the realm of "bodily-perceived aesthetics of gravitational theatre."

This project embelisshes and elaborates on this niche field of research with the proposed "Euthansia Coaster". This is best explained by the designer:

“Euthanasia Coaster” is a hypothetic euthanasia machine in the form of a roller coaster, engineered to humanely – with elegance and euphoria – take the life of a human being. Riding the coaster’s track, the rider is subjected to a series of intensive motion elements that induce various unique experiences: from euphoria to thrill, and from tunnel vision to loss of consciousness, and, eventually, death. Thanks to the marriage of the advanced cross-disciplinary research in space medicine, mechanical engineering, material technologies and, of course, gravity, the fatal journey is made pleasing, elegant and meaningful. Celebrating the limits of the human body but also the liberation from the horizontal life, this ‘kinetic sculpture’ is in fact the ultimate roller coaster: John Allen, former president of the famed Philadelphia Toboggan Company, once sad that “the ultimate roller coaster is built when you send out twenty-four people and they all come back dead. This could be done, you know.”

You can read more about the project here: Euthanasia Coaster.
Also be sure to look through the design group at: Design Interactions.

This idea caught my eye because it used architecture/engineering as a direct tool. Instead of housing a space with a specific function or using a structure for a specific purpose, this project is designed with a direct result in mind: pleasurable death. So much more creative then sticking your member into a light socket, this coaster is a bridge that transfers the passenger between states of being. Like a space tether to heaven. I wonder what other kinds of forms could result from this notion of abstract transference or being.