Santa Coloma de Gramanet, a town near Barcelona, has installed solar panels on its mausoleums:

Officials say the scheme was initially greeted with derision, but families who use the cemetery eventually supported the idea following a public campaign.

The installation cost 720,000 euros (£608,000) but will keep about 62 tonnes of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere every year, said Esteve Serret, a director of Conste-Live Energy, the company that runs the cemetery and also works in renewable energy.

"The best tribute we can pay to our ancestors, whatever your religion may be, is to generate clean energy for new generations," he said.

Which reminds me of a local entrepreneur who also wants to make cemeteries useful to the living—Greg Lundgren, owner of the Hideout and maker of cast-glass headstones.

From a profile of Lundgren and the death-care industry from five months ago:

"You want ice cream?" Lundgren asks. "You got 150 kinds. You want cereal? You've got three shelves 50 feet long in the grocery store. But when it comes to death, you have to choose either A or B." Cemeteries, he says, are some of our last urban green spaces—why should they look as dour as they do? It wouldn't take much to turn them into sculpture parks.

"Can you imagine having a Jeff Koons sculpture for your monument?" Lundgren says. "And why not? Very, very few artists, designers, architects, and sculptors are making monuments anymore. We need to revolutionize the death-care industry."

His polemic is, in part, a businessman's complaint. Lundgren's cast-glass monuments adorn cemeteries in five countries and 20 states, but he's had to fight, cemetery by cemetery, to get them in.

"You know what I want when I die? I want my ashes dumped inside a bronze sculpture of Marcel Duchamp playing chess alone. There'll be an empty chair where people can sit and look across the table at Duchamp, who's just starting the game." And he wants other people in there with him—a community of art lovers, each of whom would pitch in, say, $3,000 to commission the sculpture and add their remains. How many more people, Lundgren asks, would get together to commission a sculpture by popular Japanese artist Takashi Murakami—maybe one of his voluptuous anime girls or smiling cartoon clouds?

"There's a potential half of a million dollars of real estate inside a public art sculpture," he says, and he's off, reinventing the American cemetery, as well as public art, arts funding, and philanthropy.

The flat, staid American cemetery is a relatively new invention, pioneered by a Prussian landscape architect (Adolph Strauch) and an American businessman (Hubert Eaton), who once wrote:

I believe in a happy eternal life... I shall endeavor to build Forest Lawn [Cemetery] as different, as unlike other cemeteries as sunshine is unlike darkness. It is to be filled with towering trees, sweeping lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statuary, cheerful flowers, in contrast to traditional cemeteries containing misshapen monuments and other customary signs of earthly death.

Eaton and Strauch, banished death from his graveyard (but for different reasons—Strauch had an Enlightenment-era obsession with orderly landscapes; Eaton just thought cemeteries were a bummer). But, by making their cemeteries sterile, they also banished life.

Perhaps Serret and Lundgren will be the European-American partnership that undoes what Strauch and Eaton have wrought.

Poke around Lundgren funerary gallery—with urns, headstones, action figures, and human bone china made from cremated remains, all by local artists—here.