The Woodland Cemetery and the Narration of Memory.
School of Architecture 5.30pm drinks, 6.00pm lecture on September 7th
Stemming from a competition in 1915, Skogskyrkogården—usually translated as the
Woodland Cemetery—was designed by the architects Gunnar Asplund and Sigurd Lewerentz
and completed in 1940. As a suburban landscape on the periphery of Stockholm, the
cemetery is as much a park as a burial ground, mixing an existing forest with reconfigured
earth and planting. While the Woodland Cemetery represents one of the finest examples
of modernist landscape design the elements of its vocabulary—the meadow, earth form,
the bosk—have existed for centuries. As an amalgam, however, they are used in a way that
could only have existed in the twentieth century. It is a landscape in which architecture
and landscape architecture retain their individual identities, yet each complements and
enriches the presence of the other. This lecture traces the history of the design of the
cemetery and its architecture and presents the landscape in four seasons—suggesting the
experience of the place and its role in supporting remembrance.