ABSTRACT
The Woodland Cemetery initiates a way of thinking where an idea about a site precedes an architectural idea. With the advent of Functionalism in Erik Gunnar Asplund's work, the weight of monumentality is assumed by landscape almost exclusively. The monumentality of the landscape is asserted even more forcefully at the North Entry of the Woodland Cemetery, where the crematorium, like the Stockholm Exhibition, is organized as a fragment of urbanism. Asplund's own house at Stennas is equally deferential to the landscape. Although the Stockholm School of landscape design has an independent lineage, some traces of influence can be seen in the work of Erik Glemme, who was in charge of renovating Observatorielunden in the 1940s after a new subway line was excavated. In the case of the landscape around the Woodland Chapel, this may pertain to the origins of belief, as it is both a churchyard and a sacred grove.
