Detail of the project ed. 2020

AVAN­TO – CHAPEL OF ST LAWRENCE

Design­er	Anu Puusti­nen and Ville Hara
Loca­tion	Pap­pi­lanku­ja 3, 01510 Van­taa, Finland
Design Team	Avan­to Archi­tects Ltd / Ville Hara and Anu Puusti­nen (prin­ci­pal design­er), Archi­tects SAFA Felix Laiti­nen, stu­dent of Architecture Tom­mi Tuokko­la, Archi­tect SAFA Jon­na Käp­pi, Archi­tect ARB, SAFA Piotr Gniewek, stu­dent of Architecture Asa­mi Naito, stu­dent of Architecture
Year	2010
Pho­to credits	Exte­ri­or and pyhanlaurinkappeli__069 kuvio.jpg by kuvio.com. Inte­ri­or by Tuo­mas Uusheimo.

Pho­to external

Project descrip­tion

Con­text
Ceme­tery chapel is sit­u­at­ed in the vicin­i­ty of the his­toric Church of St. Lawrence in Vantaa.
The old stone church with its bell tow­er remain the dom­i­nant fea­tures in the land­scape. The chapel has been divid­ed in small­er parts to adapt with the scale of the sur­round­ings. The stacked stone walls of the ceme­tery are echoed in the design – a series of three chapels of dif­fer­ent sizes are nest­ed with­in orthog­o­nal mason­ry walls.
The build­ing uses sim­i­lar mate­ri­als as the old struc­tures in the area: ren­dered brick­work, nat­ur­al stone, pati­nat­ed cop­per sheet and mesh. The par­ti­tion walls are in-situ cast white con­crete. The lifes­pan tar­get for the chapel is two hun­dred years. An open art com­pe­ti­tion was sched­uled before the final con­struc­tion doc­u­ments were draft­ed, so that the art could be inte­grat­ed as a seam­less part of the architecture.

Space for grief
The chapel is designed to assist the mourn­er, giv­ing space for grief. The peo­ple attend­ing the funer­al fol­low a silent route through a series of sacral spaces, punc­tu­at­ed by inter­me­di­ate rooms. The inter­me­di­ate spaces pre­pare the vis­i­tors for the next phase of the funer­al. The white­washed mason­ry walls and a con­tin­u­ous sky­light next to it lead from one space to the next, from the low and dark to the lofty and light.

Path, a sym­bol­ic route
The chapel’s archi­tec­ture is a depic­tion of the pas­sage of a Chris­t­ian soul from here to the hereafter.
We approach along­side the out­er wall. The wall and the bell tow­er at its end speak of the earth­bound jour­ney and its end­ing. We turn the cor­ner and, shel­tered by an over­hang, fol­low the wall, to a small court­yard — a small pond, with nat­ur­al stones at its bottom.
We enter a dim­ly lit lob­by with a low ceil­ing, we can glimpse the entrance court and the old gar­den of the vic­arage behind us. Here it is pos­si­ble to stop for a moment and reflect on the expe­ri­ences and life shared with the deceased.
We fol­low the sky­light to the chapel. The chapel opens up, a high space ter­mi­nat­ing in the bright­ly lit junc­tion of the mason­ry wall, where the deceased will be met by the mourn­ers. The wall towards the grave­yard is semi trans­par­ent, glazed with a pati­nat­ed cop­per mesh on either side, a screen between this life and the here­after. From the chapel we exit, through a small gar­den, to the grave­yard. The path turns – but continues.

Illus­tra­tive project report
Down­load report

Pho­to internal

Tech­ni­cal drawings

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