DryStoneGarden

In my last post, I copped to possibly loving Gustav Vigeland’s sculpture park in Oslo. Something in me resists that word ‘Love’ but I will unreservedly admit to fascination, which led me to make a batch of watercolors studying his bronzes. Do I love his work? Maybe. Am I fascinated? Absolutely.

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I rode a bicycle in Scandinavia again this summer, a mostly coastal loop around the sea. Starting in Denmark, I rode up the east coast of Jutland, ferried to Norway and rode a section of the southern coast, then took another ferry and rode through Sweden to get back to Copenhagen. It was all really nice. I rode a lot of separated bike paths, ate a lot of salmon and rye bread, and camped in a lot of lovely spots. I swam from rocks, docks, and platforms. I saw a lot of wheat fields and a surprising amount of California native Phacelia blooming as a cover crop. I picked a gluttonous amount of bilberries. These are my sketches. I brought along watercolors this year instead of colored pencils.

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I took a winter trip to Costa Rica. It felt good to be out of the country at the start of this presidency. I’d feel better if I were there now.

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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, and I got interested in the famous little chapel. It’s one of those simple little buildings you realize is perfectly balanced and proportioned; the longer you study it, the more impressed you become. 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 another part of 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 only have photos of the exterior, but the interior has a circular space rounded by columns and lit by a skylight that is 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 in his drawings 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.

He reportedly 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. It’s a pretty bad tree, actually, a child’s idea of a tree rather than a realistic representation, but I like how it shows his thinking. The tree’s canopy and the roof have the same triangular shape and the trunk could be another column.

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, though the columns are still tapered like tree trunks and the door now looks a bit like a trunk. 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.

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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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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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