To continue (approaching the Woodland Cemetery)

Abstract

This thesis examines the Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm, Sweden, designed and executed between 1914 and 1940 by the architects Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz. The study consists of three parts. The first examines the significance of interment, of the return of the body to the realm of nature upon death. The second speculates upon the operation of time in relation to the idea of memory, focussing on the necessity of forgetting in the process of mourning, and in the process of architectural invention. It brings to the fore the impossibility of forgetting that which is most deeply known, and thus suggests a paradoxical relationship between that which is known and that which is new. This paradox informs those things that must be constructed in the mind and in the world in order to continue beyond a point of traumatic change. The final part is a reconstruction through drawing of eight stages in the evolution of the project. It focuses primarily on the large scale planning of the site, but is related to more detailed elements of the design in order to show the continuity of themes throughout the project, bot in its temporal and physical aspects. Although it comes at the end of the text, it is conceptually prior to the other two sections, which were developed upon the basis of the close reading of the existing drawings, and the interplay between continuity and change in the project. The conclusion seeks to bring some of these ideas together in a form that is not closed, which requires continuation.