Ritual of death - design and construction of crematorium in Berlin, Germany

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1999 by Peter Davey

Though this cemetery is far from the roaring centre of Berlin, it perhaps indicates the qualities of space, light and materiality which the architects may create in the Chancellery now under construction (p50).

Crematoria are difficult. In the west, there are no established rituals associated with burning bodies - indeed, the process of dealing with the dead by fire has been legal for only about a century. For all the distinguished precedents,(1) there are no rites to give comfort to the survivors that have the resonance of 'earth to earth', and the casting of the handful of soil on the coffin. And a crematorium designer in modern society has to cope with the fact that the people who assemble to pay their respects to the dead may be of all faiths - or none. We have no agreed religion, yet are perhaps still informed by a vestigial notion of Christianity. The people who assemble for funerals are there to show love for the departed, their concern for the living, and the formal process of seeing someone off the stage of life.

Axel Schultes and Charlotte Frank say that they were rather frightened when they won the competition for the crematorium at Baumschulenweg in south-east Berlin. It was a task which required great tenderness, but not sentimentality; sense of occasion without pomp; awe without terror They decided to make a grove with irregularly placed abstracted trees that reach to the sky and bring heaven's light to a cavern-like space that focuses on a calm circular pool where water flows quietly over the edge and an egg - the symbol of generation - floats in the middle. This is the only kitsch moment in the whole affair.

You arrive at the formal nineteenth-century gatehouse of the cemetery, to be met with an axis that directs to the calm formal entrance of the symmetrical new building (which has replaced a very grim old East German predecessor). The central entrance, rather thin and very tall, draws you in because, beyond it, you can see the sky and a glimpse of the strange rather overgrown formal woodland which was not allowed to be used for burials under the DDR (it is now, though there are very few grave places left). Up the steps and you are in the grand space, the abstracted grove, in which irregularly ordered columns make places where every individual can find a particular moment. Here, people will wait before and after the services in the three chapels. They can hide, chat, grieve, find ways of saying goodbye.

The grove-hall is communal. Off it, the chapels are for particular expressions of grief and departure, varied in size according to the nature of particular event. They look out over the cemetery and the approach axis. Automated louvres modify daylight. Everything is controlled, calm, ordered. The crematorium can deal with hundreds of corpses,(2) but its nobility lies in its tenderness: its gentle conflation of archetypes of grove, tomb and cave.

I am moved by the solidness of it, its resonance of sound and space. No one could fail to be touched by the marvelous command of light, which pours from the column tops and magically washes over the side walls from slots that recall Peter Zumthor's brilliance at Vals (AR August 1997). I am even inspired by the lack of absolute perfection in construction, for (though I suppose that our photographs will not reveal it), the concrete is (unlike an Ando or a Zumthor building) not always perfectly cast. There are runnels and wounds in the body, metaphors of our own stupidity, our lack of perfection, our human-ness. The building speaks with humility, dignity, generosity and love. P.D.

1 Notably of course in Scandinavia, where Asplund's wonderful Woodland Chapel established the nobility of a new twentieth-century type.

2 But it does not do so at the moment. Because of a disagreement between the borough (Treptow) and the bank which has financed the building, it remains unused

Architect

Axel Schultes Architekten, Berlin

Project design

Axel Schultes, Charlotte Frank

Project management

Margret Kister, Christoph Witt

Project team

Daniela Andresen, Bob Choeff, Patrick Dierks, Christian Helfrich, Andreas Schuldes, Till Waninger

Structural engineer

GSE Saar Enseleit & Partner, Berlin

Building services

Brandi Ingenieure

Acoustics

Akustik-Ingenieurburo Moll

Photographs

Werner Huthmacher