![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Facade](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e397/b3fc/4b67/6900/0001/newsletter/krematorium-berlin_01_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592464)
- Area: 9339 m²
-
Photographs:Mattias Hamrén
![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Windows](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e3b5/b3fc/4b67/6900/0007/newsletter/krematorium-berlin_09_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592485)
'People die and they are not happy' – architecture can't change that. A place of rest, a space for silence: that is something it still manages to provide, despite the fact that not even stones are as heavy as they were in more solid epochs with a firmer belief in the eternal, as in Saqqara, as in Giza, for example.
![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Facade, Column, Arch](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e3a5/b3fc/4b67/6900/0004/newsletter/krematorium-berlin_04_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592474)
Our final road is uncertain. Neither church nor temple of the dead offer a model for the path to nothingness or angelhood. In lending shape to freedom and necessity, the intensity, the texture of a Maghreb mosque comes closest to meeting the task: a Piazza Coperta, a place in the middle of this cenotaph, where many can assemble and yet the individual is shielded; a catalyst for all our feelings. In this room – 5000 years young – the columns with their capitals of light establish the only reference left to us: a cosmological contrast between populated stacks of clay and the sun with its light.
![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Windows](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e3dd/b3fc/4b67/6900/000f/medium_jpg/krematorium-berlin_15_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592505)
The ceremonial halls – two for 50, one for 250 people – are simply boxes of split stone, set open-fronted into a second, slat-steered casing of glass: the departed soul, the coffin, the urn has gone before already, into the realm of light, is at one now with the heavens, the clouds, the trees.
![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Image 8 of 19](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e3b7/b3fc/4b67/6900/0008/newsletter/krematorium-berlin_10_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592488)
Like no other building – the Museum in Bonn and the Chancellery in Berlin are no exceptions – this one reflects the unbroken will of the architects. A hollowed, jointless block 50 by 70 meters, 10 meters deep in the earth, 10 meters high above it, one stone, one grave-stone, insisting on the material consistency of its several spaces. And if there were a word of truth in Ludwig Wittgenstein's claim that architecture 'compels and glorifies; that where there is nothing to glorify there can be no architecture', then this structure glorifies the quintessence of architecture, celebrates space, the silence of walls in light.
![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Facade, Concrete](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e3ab/b3fc/4b67/6900/0005/medium_jpg/krematorium-berlin_05_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592478)
![Crematorium Baumschulenweg / Shultes Frank Architeckten - Beam](https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/50fe/e39a/b3fc/4b67/6900/0002/medium_jpg/krematorium-berlin_02_photographer-mattias-hamren.jpg?1414592468)