Crematorium Heimolen

The design by Claus and Kaan architects for the crematorium Heimolen takes a pragmatic attitude. They comply with the location and arrangement the client had suggested. The auditorium building stands next to an existing utility building at the entrance to the site, and the crematorium is at the rear. The schedule of requirements is handled with precision and sensitivity and the architecture is solemn and generous, but the project shuns emphatic symbolism.
With strippeddown and semantically indeterminate references to a monumental, classical idiom, the architecture generates a fitting setting for a programme in which an emotionally-charged event no longer has any fixed form. This certainly applies to those rooms — the hall, the foyer, the auditoria and the crematorium — where the architecture has to free itself from specific expectations to make way for ceremonial events.