Woodland Cemetery

While in Stockholm, I made a pilgrimage in the southern suburbs to the Woodland Cemetery or Skogskyrkogården. This cemetery was built over three decades and completed in the 1940s by Erik Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz, two of Sweden's leading twentieth-century architects. Architecturally, it represents these architects' shift from National Romaticism to a more modernist approach. It's also, of course, an extraordinary cemetery, the graves amongst pine forests that are criss-crossed by cleverly-laid out paths connecting  funerary chapels. The spatial themes of the stand of trees forming an enclosure, or of a forest clearing---always open to the sky---recur in various guises; from what little I know, this has a special Nordic resonance. And for all the design's thoughtful control and indebtedness to historical forms, it offers a typically Swedish accessible simplicity.

The Chapel of the Holy Cross, the largest chapel in the cemetery.

The Chapel of the Resurrection.

The beautiful Woodland Chapel. Unfortunately I couldn't enter the surprising interior.