Last rites: deep in a Slovenian woodland, the material and the spiritual are sensitively conjoined in a tranquil haven for human leavetaking and remembrance - Ales Vodopivec cemetery - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, July, 2002 by Claudia Kugel

Srebrenice's new cemetery forms the first phase of a larger project for a forest graveyard which began as an open competition in 1989. The ensuing Balkans war and Slovenia's seccession from Yugoslavia put the scheme on hold, but it has at last been completed to a design by Ales Vodopivec. The brief for this first phase involved a funerary hall with four smaller attendant chapels, and a separate ancillary building. Space for some 3000 graves has been carefully created in the surrounding forest. Comparisons with Asplund and Lewerentz's Woodland Cemetery in Stockholm (1920) are irresistible, but the project is also part of a wider tradition of restrained Modernism (Vodopivec describes it as an 'architecture of silence') that engages in a dialogue with nature in the manner of Kahn and Aalto and reflects concerns with ritual and memory.

The two parts of the complex are aligned on a processional north-south axis. This runs from the main road to the north through the forest to link with a series of serpentine paths that meander around the grave fields on the eastern flank of the site. At its south end, the axis terminates in a mound of trees reserved for the ashes of unidentified or unclaimed bodies, giving special and poignant prominence to the unknown dead.

The first public indication of the cemetery's presence is a flower shop set into the single-storey ancillary building on the edge of the main road. From its progress through the forest, the processional approach route eventually opens out into a clearing to reveal the main funerary hall attached to a row of family chapels. Arrival is denoted by a simple colonnaded portico (traditionally used to mark a consecrated space), its arboreal form an abstraction of the surrounding trees. Straddling the road, the portico leads into the main chapel, an austere box glazed on three sides and enclosed by an external layer of slatted timber screens. Filtered through the screens, the wooded landscape of pine, beech, hornbeam and spruce forms a serene backdrop to the funerary rites.

In the smaller yet equally ascetic family chapels, light filters through precisely cut clerestory strips so that the ceilings appear to float above the walls. Heightening the sense of seclusion and contemplation, each chapel overlooks a small internal courtyard. Chapels are linked and serviced on the east side by a long corridor, animated by light gently percolating through vertical incisions along one wall. Throughout the chapel complex, materials such as untreated oak, fairfaced concrete, glass and local stone are as consistently simple and reticent as the spatial organization.

Vodopivec's modest complex of buildings exhibits little that is especially surprising or exciting, yet in orchestrating a balance between the material and the spiritual, the architecture is infused with a powerful tension derived from the almost clinical geometry of the manmade set against the organic and enduring presence of nature. Bare and mute, freed of all image and illusion, architecture and landscape combine to form a sober, tranquil and utterly fitting place for the final leavetaking. CLAUDIA KUGEL