Central Lutheran Columbarium and Memorial Courtyard

The memory of individual members is an important attribute of a strong community. Across cultures, physical memorials to the dead record a community’s past. In western culture the impersonal scale and anonymous character of contemporary cemeteries is symptomatic of our modern condition.The sense of belonging to a specific place and to a community of people is missing. But within these apparently unrelated and transitory communities, there are smaller groups who share particular values and an association with a particular physical place. This project served one such group, a Lutheran congregation, which sought to redress the detachment and commercial nature of local cemeteries by establishing a memorial.