Meditations poetiques

Architectural Review, The, Jan, 1997 by Peter Davey

In an age when faith is lacking, or has been transmuted into excuses for bigotry and violence, there are few paradigms for the creation of sacred places. But there are some late twentieth-century buildings that must move even the most flint-hearted materialist to some notion of the numinous - Juha Leiviska's churches, for instance, or Ricardo Legorreta's cathedral at Managua (AR November 1995). To these must be added the little open-air meditation centre at the war cemetery at Frejus in France which has been designed by Bernard Desmoulin for the Ministere des Anciens Combattants.

The client's very sensitive requirement was for a place which would enable people of the four main faiths of the soldiers who lie there (Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian) to contemplate and pray in privacy, yet have a sense of community.

Desmoulin devised a very simple plan in which two pairs of spaces, each linked by a screen against the sky, are set on a stone platform and divided by a central way. Screens divide the spaces from each other and the only solid presence in each is a slab of rusted steel which contains an engraved stone, emblematic of the faith to which the volume is dedicated.

The structure is also of rusted steel: I-sections made in a simple frame that gives the place an almost Greek clarity and nobility, where the material itself speaks of war, destruction and endurance. The horizontal and vertical screens are made of cedar slats on thin rusted steel secondary members.

These photographs were taken on a wonderful sunny day when the merits of the building can be most clearly seen on the printed page - all the multifarious effects of shadow and light, open and closedness, privacy and community. Even the scent of the surrounding lavender fields can almost be sensed. You can understand how essence, time and memory have been given presence by the slowly moving shadows. It will be starker on a grey day, or in the rain, or the fog. Perhaps then its gauntness against the elements will be an even more clear reminder of the terrible grim abstraction of human values in which all those brave young men died so needlessly.

Unlike them, the building will grow old, and age will change it. The wood will weather to grey, the brown oxide of the steel will stain the stone and the slats. But the place will weep with dignity, and there will remain (however faint) the aroma of cedar, symbolic alike of the coffin and the great trees of life from which the slats have come.