DryStoneGarden

This was the other garden I photographed in Sweden, the Paul Jonska garden. Paul Jonska, the legend, the luminary. Apparently he was a sea captain who travelled the world and brought home many worldly items along with an English garden sensibility. The garden is old-fashioned, but a charming place to take a break during a bicycle tour.

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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.