ARCHITECT'S

‘People die and they are not happy’ – architecture can’t change that. A place of rest, a space for silence: that is something it still manages to provide, despite the fact that not even stones are as heavy as they were in more solid epochs with a firmer belief in the eternal, as in Saqqara, as in Giza, for example. Like no other building the Baumschulenweg Crematorium reflects the unbroken will of the architects. A hollowed, jointless block 50 by 70 metres, 10 metres deep in the earth, 10 metres high above it, one stone, one grave-stone, insisting on the material consistency of its several spaces. And if there were a word of truth in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s claim that architecture ‘compels and glorifies; that where there is nothing to glorify there can be no architecture’, then this structure glorifies the quintessence of architecture, celebrates space, the silence of walls in light. (© Schultes Frank Architekten)

COLLECTION

DFW