Located in one of the country’s most important nineteenth-century landscapes, the Garden Mausoleum at Lakewood Cemetery reinterprets an ancient typology in terms of contemporary attitudes toward death and mourning, while minimizing its visual impact on the historic landscape it occupies.

Nestled in the side of a pre-existing hillside and virtually invisible from the majority of the cemetery, a series of underground catacombs orient themselves alternately to the surrounding landscape (horizontal) and to the sky (vertical). A single monumental gesture—earthen mound, portal, skylight—signifies the presence of each interment chamber and relates this communal building to the formal gesture of the individual family mausolea that surround it. Above the ground plane, a small rectangular building provides street level access to the underground vaults and houses the more public reception and orientation functions of the cemetery, including a small committal chapel.  In each space, rhythmic apertures gesture to movement, the transition between the [public] world of the living and the [solitary] experience of the bereaved. The dark, forbidding granite forms of the mausoleum are carved away at each opening, revealing the poché of the mausoleum as heavily figured white marble and glass tesserae, recalling the mosaics in the landmark neo-Byzantine Lakewood Memorial Chapel.

• Location: Minneapolis, MN

• Type: Cultural/Religious

• Role: Project Designer, with Joan Soranno FAIA, Design Principal, and John Cook FAIA, Project Architect

• Photos: Paul Crosby