Description

Although not situated on the periphery of the capital, the cemetery’s immediate surroundings exhibit very similar qualities. Bounded to the west by a motorway feeder road, to the east by allotments and houses, its paths and open spaces open out onto the greenery of Tegel to the north. Visitors arrive from the road on the south side and are led in such that a way that they are aware of the separation of chapel and ancillary spaces – which are accessible via a rotunda – but are deflected away from the latter by the arc of a concrete wall. The vehicular access for the funeral services and not least the underground floor with the coffin chamber are screened from view. The form and colour of the complex with the chapel have a chthonic, earthen character: the speckled brickwork in varying shades of brown, the brown and green on the copper roofing, the molten and wire-glass windows of the openings sometimes green sometimes frosted. The architecture does not emphasise any particular façade. As such, it is all the more surprising that the building is so legible. All parts of the building are arranged on an axis, beginning with the double doors of the entrance and exit and marked by the folded-over form of the rooflight. If one walks around the building from the west to the south and from east to north, the winding staircase to the gallery is legible as a rounded glass tower, the gallery as a block, the waiting room as an octagon, the columbarium as a cylinder, the toilets as a cube and the room for the flowers and wreaths as a glass sloping roof.

The axis passes through the stainless-steel-clad double doors of the entrance and measures 16.2 metres to the rear of the chapel. Descending slightly, it marks the passage from this to the other world. The gallery is arranged high up to the left and provides space for an organist and choir, the twelve rows of pews for the funeral congregation to the right. The floor is an earth-coloured linoleum, the ceiling concrete with white plaster. The brick bond is stretcher/stretcher/header throughout except for behind the pews and at the front – to the left and right of the “catafalque” in front of the exit – where it gives way to a decorative brickwork lattice. Beneath the rooflight hangs a metal framework containing tubes of frosted glass in the form of a stretched hexagon. Longer in the middle than at the sides, the tubes are not for artificial lighting but instead filter daylight from the rooflight and evoke associations with a chandelier or crown that floats over the deceased.

The influence of the work of Hans Scharoun, Hugo Häring and Max Taut on the oeuvre of both the architects is unmistakable. Certainly, at first glance the chapel at Am Fließtal cemetery appears expressive and organic. Even more apparent is its functionally and rationally determined form, designed from the inside to the outside. The geometry and materials of the building are identical internally and externally, creating a work of great transparency and harmony.

Architecture and Urbanism, no. 8/1978, p. 5, pp. 23- | Architekten- und Ingenieur-Verein zu Berlin (Ed.): Berlin und seine Bauten. Teil X Band A Anlagen und Bauten für die Versorgung. 3 Bestattungswesen, Berlin and Munich 1981, pp. 70-, p. 106 | Bucciarelli, Piergiacomo: L’Architettura di Fehling e Gogel. Vitalità dell’espressionismo, Bari 1981, pp. 66- | Conrads, Ulrich, Sack, Manfred: Hermann Fehling und Daniel Gogel. Werkmonographie, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden 1981, pp. 38-, p. 65

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.