Description

In Japan, cremation has always been the most common form of funerary rite. The funeral itself can often take hours. The lengthy ceremony consists of a series of rituals, which have a set format, but are nonetheless open-minded. Unlike in central Europe, where almost all crematoria – such as Peter Behren’s crematorium in Hagen from 1907 or Erik Gunnar Asplund’s building in Stockholm from 1940 – observe a strict separation between the solemn ritual and the prosaic machinery of cremation, in Japan the actual cremation of the deceased is not entirely concealed from the funeral congregation.

The building stands on a 3.3-hectare site on the outskirts of Nakatsu, a municipality with 70,000 inhabitants in southern Japan. The site is bounded on the north by a road with open countryside to the south. Between the two lies a small park named the “Hill of the winds” – in Japanese “Kaze-no-Oka”. At the edge of the elliptical site, eight recently discovered burial mounds from the 3rd century can be found as well as a smaller old cemetery. The location therefore has a long history of its own, which the voluminous new building now extends into a new phase. Despite its size, the building attempts to appear as inconspicuous as possible, distributing the large extent of its volume in a wide, low-lying building. From the grounds, the building manifests itself as an abstract sculptural ensemble of boulder-like forms that appear to sink into the earth; an obvious allusion to mankind’s return to the bosom of mother nature.

The complex comprises an open courtyard, a garden court and an internal courtyard, as well as three buildings, each with distinctly different functions, geometry and materials. The first section is the crematorium, a quadratic volume made of grey concrete; the second is the waiting area, a triangle clad in brown corten steel; the third section is the funeral hall, an octagon faced with grey-brown brick. Slightly inclined corridors connect each of these elements to the next.

From the aforementioned open courtyard, a square measuring exactly 21.65 metres in each direction, the path leads around the edge of a covered “cloister”. Leaving the garden court on one side and proceeding onwards further and further, one finally arrives in an anteroom. Its entrance is the full height and width of the space – there is no fourth wall to the space. The three concrete walls to the left, right and rear bear traces of cedar timber shuttering, horizontal below and vertical­ above, creating the impression of a plinth and upper storey. A single cylindrical column stands in the middle of the stage-like room and disappears through an opening in the ceiling.

The process of taking leave from the deceased begins directly behind this anteroom in one of the viewing rooms located behind a sliding wood latticework door. Each of these measures 5.54 by 6.6 metres. Subdued light enters through slats high up in one of its white walls. The coffin rests on a black stone catafalque on the narrow side of the room, from which soon after it will be taken for cremation. The deceased does not disappear through the floor – which would create the impression of a burial rather than of a cremation – but is taken to one of the six cremation furnaces on the east side of the building. After the cremation, the mourners receive the bones and ashes on a tray for transferral to the urn. This ceremony takes place in two enshrinement rooms whose form and atmosphere are similar to that of the viewing rooms.

The four sparse rooms for the viewing and enshrinement as well as the narrow hall in front of the wall with the furnace doors surround the interior courtyard. This courtyard is half the size of the external courtyard, but with a size of 10.8 by 10.8 metres is much more than simply a source of light. In the pauses between the rites, the funeral congregation can gather and wait in this plain hollow cube. Here one’s view turns to the smooth reflective surface of a rectangular pool of water. The west and north sides are enclosed by impervious concrete walls, the east and south sides by contrast are open and glazed. A roof canopy reduces the intensity of the light streaming into the hall in front of the cremation furnaces.

In contrast to all the other areas of the ensemble, the waiting area – for the mourners while waiting for the cremation to finish – is lighter, warmer, open and friendlier. With its parquet flooring, elegant chairs and broad expanse of windows with a view of the “hill of the winds” and the mountains in the distance, it resembles a lobby or a lounge. In the centre of the space, a set of steps lead to a small platform. Here the spatial form above and below is that of an arc of a circle, the only curved form in the entire building.

A little to the west of this area, at the end of a corridor leading southwards to the park, one reaches the funeral chapel. The octagonal form of the “chapel” does not sit straight, tipping forward markedly over its entrance. It has a diameter of 15.46 metres. There are absolutely no views into or out of the room. The white plastered walls and black slate floor of the room are instead lit from above by only four circular holes in the roof, from the right by a vertical slot behind the “altar” and from the left by a horizontal band above the floor that runs along two of the eight sides of the octagon. The facing brickwork on the outside are laid without joints or mortar and anchored to the concrete walls with steel ties.

The ceremony reaches its end with the burial of the urn on the gentle grassy incline of the hill of the winds, reached via a path running around its perimeter.

The crematorium in Nakatsu has little interest in what journalists might term attractive architecture. More important than the resolution of such formal concerns was the arrangement of paths between the parts of the building. These are not designed with efficient functional operation in mind, but as a physical and mental passage from stage to stage. The Japanese “rites of passage”, to use the terminology of the ethnologist Arnold van Gennep, accord this processional architecture great importance. The arrival of the coffin, the cremation of the corpse, the enshrinement of the ashes, the burial of the urn: with each step the route leads from predominantly light to increasingly dark, from wide expanse to increasingly constricted, from open to progressively closed. In this way, the building gradually leads one closer to a notion of the underworld. This slow movement from space to space is also reminiscent of the gradual unfolding of the spaces of a Shinto shrine.

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