Daniel Kiczka
Death in Modern Times. RWTH Aachen (Germany)
The aim of extending the cemetery at Maastricht is to respond to requirements of today’s people, influenced by urban life. The tradition of burials is to be brought into line with the individual needs, overcoming outdated concepts of cemeteries.
The new cemetery, like a ‚hortus conclusus’, is separated from its surroundings, emphasizing the diversity of its interior. The concept reflects the diverse and fragmented state of the city by its superimposed complex and characteristic structures, which present in their ambivalent experience and perception, an adequate reaction to the diversity of modern society. The cemetery is open and intimate creaing - through the great variety in its sections - spaces, which favour a personal approach.
The position of the walls, a guiding principle in the perception of perspective, is based on an interior network, linked with interrelated axes and focal points, which result from the position of the entrances.
Orientation is also possible by visual links between the buildings, which are set along the walls constituting their basic structures and serving as focal points of a wider system of orientation.
The main building reflects the underlying and characteristic principle of the cemetery as a space which can be perceived as complex and ambivalent and together with the chapel it constitutes a centre of these intense experiences of space.
The chapel, on one side ,extended wall and cube', loses its massive austerity towards the inner courtyard by a complex interaction of spaces and recesses, combining distance and confinement, covered space and indirect light. This underlying principle of different overlapping layers opens up on a smaller scale in the interior of the chapel in the double wall, the baroque ‘teatrum sacrum’, which serves as a free space and a lightwall, thus giving intimacy and sensuality to this otherwise strictly rational room.
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