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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 the later, more technical drawings, 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.

Scandinavia Drawings

This summer my bike tour was in Scandinavia. Mostly Sweden, a little bit of Norway, a smaller bit of Denmark. Copenhagen to Gothenburg to Stockholm to Oslo and then back to Copenhagen. A lot of windswept coastline, a lot of forest, a lot of meadows and tidy farmland. None of the dramatic Norwegian fjords, but a lot of the moody Swedish ones. More rain than I would have chosen, but not really any more than I should have expected. A great trip. As with past Euro bike tours, I will post about some of the stone and garden sights I saw. For now, here are my drawings from the trip.

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Paris to Bologna Drawings

These are my drawings from the bike trip. They start with the Palais Royale fountain — my favorite spot in Paris — then the Loire, the Atlantic coast including Noirmoutier and Ile de Re, the Dordogne, Toulouse, the Gran Massif, Nice, and then a couple of sketches of Emilia Romagna and the Langhe in Piedmont. I might return to this post to label the drawings and alternately mock France and sing its praises, but for now I just feel like posting the drawings.


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Spain and Portugal Drawings

This is my first blog post in a couple of years. I’ve spent the Covid years either working or hunkered down, and haven’t really felt motivated. This summer, though, I took my first significant trip in three years, riding a bicycle for six weeks in Portugal and Spain, and I got some of my blogging mojo back; Spain and Portugal are absolutely filled with subjects right in the drystonegarden wheelhouse. I expect to do at least a half dozen posts before my mojo runs out, and maybe I’ll keep going after that.
To start with, these are my drawings from the trip, almost one per day, loosely following my progress from Lisbon up through the interior of Portugal, then through the northern interior of Spain to Pamplona, then along Spain’s north coast loosely following the Camino de Santiago Norte to Santiago de Compostela, and then back down to Lisbon. It was a great trip, my third bike trip in Europe, and I can’t wait until my next one.
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Bourgeois Spiders

So where were the spiders while the fly tried to break our balls? — Mike Pence David Bowie

Last summer I saw a collection of Louise Bourgeois’s spider sculptures in the gardens at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. I’d seen them before, indoors at the MOMA in San Francisco, but I liked them even better when I saw them outdoors set against the Rijskmuseum’s formal brick building and gardens. And I appreciate them even more now after drawing them; they’re quite varied, each one looks different from every angle, and the context around them can create a lot of interesting effects.

This one reminds me of a tree as much as a spider, as if Bourgeois or her fabricator had been snorkeling in a mangrove swamp.

But most of them have a strong metal spider vibe. H. R. Giger with a little bit of Tolkien thrown in, the Hobbit spiders rather than the scarier Lord of the Rings one.

Her largest and most famous spider is called ‘Maman’, which means ‘Mother’. It wasn’t at the Rijksmuseum; I haven’t seen it in person, but I’m a sucker for these kinds of installation videos with cranes and cherry pickers and shots of the lug bolts holding it all together. I’ve seen videos with her talking about the symbolism and ideation of it all, but I think underneath it all she just realized that big metal spiders would look cool. Very very cool.

Amsterdam to Italy

I did another bicycle trip this summer, riding from Amsterdam to Italy. Fun times. I started in Dutch canal and windmill country, rode down through Belgium, bits of France, Luxembourg and Germany, then to Basel, Zurich, and Innsbruck, and then down through the Dolomites to just outside Venice. I went through 9 countries all told, though that includes just 20 minutes crossing Liechtenstein. I took lots of photos of gardens and stone along the way which I’ll be showing in the future. For now, these are my drawings from the trip.
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