Woodland Cemetery
On my trip through Sweden, I went to Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm. I don’t go to many cemeteries, but Woodland’s one of the famous and influential cemeteries of the world, a Unesco site with lovely treelined lanes through the forest, quite pleasant to pedal through, and I got interested in the famous little chapel. An architect friend said the chapel’s one of those simple little buildings you realize is perfectly balanced and proportioned. I love how it fits into the landscape.
The architect Gunnar Asplund originally planned a more traditional neo-classical building. Apparently he and his clients had second thoughts (though his partner on the project, Lewerentz, did eventually design a building in that style for the cemetery) so he designed a more vernacular building inspired by Liselund Castle which he saw on his honeymoon in Denmark. He loosely copied Liseland’s roof and pillars, but he added a metaphoric aspect — in elevation the door and roof are like a child’s drawing of a tree. I wasn’t able to go inside but the interior has a circular space rounded by columns and lit by a skylight, possibly a bit like a glade or fairy ring. I’m not sure how obvious he wanted the tree metaphor to be — it seems like he backed away a little from representing the idea as the design evolved — but the effect is there. I’m curious if he ever spoke or wrote about it, maybe the multitudinous Swedish architects who read this blog can let me know.
Apparently he made hundreds of sketches while working on the design of the chapel. The one above shows the tree concept most clearly — the columns are dark like trunks and he includes a tree to illustrate the similarity. The tree’s canopy has the same triangular shape as the roof, and it’s a child’s idea of a tree rather than a realistic representation. It’s a pretty bad tree, actually, but I like how it shows his thinking.
This drawing seems to be a later iteration. The columns are white and the tree canopies no longer have the same triangular shape as the roof. The idea is still there, just not quite so on the nose.
And then in this one, the building doesn’t really suggest a tree at all.
But when you see the building, it feels like part of the forest.
There are many photos of the chapel and the cemetery here and here and here.
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