A short while ago, we published an in-depth feature on designs for the dead covering every typology from Thomas Willson’s towering, pyramidal mausoleum to Katrina Spade’s highly organic alternative. It appears that architects have come a long way since Willson’s outlandish monument to mortality; just as Spade illustrated that a contemporary approach to the handling of death might help us deal with our collective humanity, an architecture firm in Hungary has utilized modern design to reframe a funeral home as a light, meditative space.
L.Art Architectural Office conceived their funeral chapel in Dabas as a modern, minimalist intervention within an existing cemetery. Speaking to Architizer, architects István Ligetvári and Dorottya Ligetvari reflected on the challenge of working in a country where people are not familiar with such projects.
“We had some difficulties because of the Hungarian context. There are very few roots in the architecture of Hungarian funeral homes,” explains István Ligetvári, head architect for the project. “Although features of the contemporary design were hard to be consumed by local society because they were not aware of it, they grew to be happy with it. At the beginning, we made effort in persuading the city government not to be afraid of the design language. Cooperating with them was able to make it acceptable by the locals.”
The gleaming white volume contrasts with the muted tones of most memorials and churches in the region, in keeping with the architect’s desire to create a more optimistic space, a celebration of life rather than a building purely dedicated to mourning. “We greatly appreciate the local’s open-mindedness to welcome the color of white, instead of the black, as the symbol Heaven,” says Ligetvári. “The stress is on afterlife instead of the sorrowful fact of death.”
Despite its apparent simplicity, the building is full of metaphorical references all presented in an abstract manner, unlike the traditional gothic and roman architectural styles typically associated with ecclesiastical buildings of previous eras.
Across the front elevation, a cross composed of intersecting I-beams denotes the building’s funerary function with the utmost simplicity: as with Tadao Ando’s extraordinary Church of the Light, the cross is capable of telling the story of the building with only two linear strokes. This use of minimalist adornment continues throughout the complex, each element forming a subtle metaphor for birth, life, and death.
“The rising buttress symbolizes birth, the central statue symbolizes the lived life, and, behind it, there is the gate of Heaven,” explains Ligetvári. “The inner part of the building is the ‘dock’ from where the last journey starts. The transparent ‘spirit bird’ motif of the blue glass triptych symbolizes the ‘otherside’.”
The chapel itself possesses a trapezoidal layout: two walls extending beyond the building’s boundaries toward the forest to the east and west. These modern buttresses represent each person’s path through life, as Ligetvári elaborates: “The buttress rises from the ground towards the main weight of the building — which contains the funeral home — and continues in a solid wall under the roof, which turns away and begins to slope towards the forest and returns below the surface. From Alpha to Omega.”
Perhaps the most significant feature of the building, though, is its sliding timber partition, which rolls away beneath the cross on the front elevation to open the chapel up to nature. “By pulling away the sliding partition, the outer and inner part becomes one, and that’s how everybody becomes involved in the ceremony,” reflects Ligetvári.
This simple architectural gesture encapsulates the evolution of funerary architecture in its entirety: from Willson’s foreboding vertical morgue to L.Art’s intervention in a Hungarian cemetery, we have progressed from an architecture of intimidation to one of accessibility. We have moved from the realms of traditional embellishment to that of cool, understated minimalism. Above all, we have traversed from darkness to light.
If the design evolution of chapels and morgues serves to represent our collective view of death, perhaps we are slowly but surely coming to terms with our mortality — and whatever comes next …