{"id":6857,"date":"2025-01-13T19:24:06","date_gmt":"2025-01-14T00:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/?p=6857"},"modified":"2025-01-24T11:28:50","modified_gmt":"2025-01-24T16:28:50","slug":"editors-introduction-11-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bu.edu\/sequitur\/2025\/01\/13\/editors-introduction-11-1\/","title":{"rendered":"editor’s introduction"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Catherine Lennartz<\/span><\/h4>\n

What lies beyond the veil? Some version of this question has inspired people from every walk of life to use mortality as a source of inspiration. No matter our beliefs, death and its unknowns have yielded varied forms of artistic production that remain evocative to this day. Rituals surrounding death permeate human history and make up a large part of the earliest examples of human creative production that we study as art and architectural historians. From funerary complexes to sacred objects and texts, from intuition and dreams to meditation and self-discovery, there is no doubt that imagining what exists beyond our lives has been a fruitful endeavor. Just south of Stockholm, Sweden, a cemetery called Skogskyrkog\u00e5rden<\/em> marries architecture and landscape in its modern take on these age-old questions (fig.1).<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 1. The Way of the Seven Wells, Woodland Cemetery (2022). Photo Johan Dehlin.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The Woodland Cemetery, as it is known in English, utilizes landscape and nature to create a transitional space for people to come to terms with the new world they find themselves in after losing a loved one. It was built in the first half of the twentieth century following the designs of Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz.1 <\/sup>Their partnership\u2014though not without disagreements\u2014resulted in a design that Caroline Constant describes as \u201cimparting a sense of serenity in the face of death through reconciliation with nature.\u201d2<\/sup>\u00a0The atmosphere is set by the entrance: a walled, semi-circular space that leads visitors into a long, narrow walkway. The retaining wall, standing around twelve feet tall, is topped by trees, evoking the sense of being below ground. As one walks down the road, the walls shrink, or rather the path rises, until an open grassy area is revealed (figs. 2-3). Coming into view to the left are the main chapels and crematorium serving the cemetery. Other chapels are spread across the grounds, offering a variety of options for memorial services of all kinds, religious or secular. The rest of the cemetery is covered with tall pine trees, creating a sheltered canopy over the gravestones occasionally crisscrossed by open avenues. No buildings stand taller than the trees across the grounds.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Figure 2. Entrance to the Woodland Cemetery (2017). Photo Per Blomberg.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Figure 3. Entrance to the Woodland Cemetery (ca. 1950-70). Photo Ok\u00e4nd \/ ArkDes.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The largest chapel, the Chapel of the Holy Cross, echoes the entrance path\u2019s transition from contained to open in the way it holds funerary <\/span>services (fig. 4). Guests enter the chapel from an interior side door and sit facing a large curved and frescoed wall depicting scenes of Viking funerary practices. The floor angles down gently towards the altar where the coffin is laid. At the end of the service, guests are invited to walk up the sloping floor to the back of the chapel, where curtains are drawn, flooding the chapel with light and revealing a glazed wall protected by a wrought-iron grill. Both the window and the grill are then lowered into the ground, opening the whole wall onto a covered porch. At the center of this porch, in an opening reminiscent of a Roman compluvium<\/em>, sits the Resurrection Monument, a bronze sculpture reaching for the sky. The porch sits at ground level, granting access to the lawn, paths, and lily-pond beyond. The whole funeral service thus transitions from a protected interior space for the duration of the ceremony and eulogies to a procession up and gradually out into nature. Each space offers the opportunity for pause, as the mourner wishes.<\/span><\/p>\n