Careful attention to textures can make a mausoleum a thing of beauty rather than a sombre building with a good example the Old Gatehouse mausoleum in Melbourne.
Located in Melbourne general cemetery, behind the Old Gatehouse, the entry to the mausoleum is on the edge of Princes Park. “What was required was a burial place for 618 people – a mausoleum burial place, which is very much favoured by the Italian community,” says Philip Harmer, director of Harmer Architecture. “A mausoleum building as a type is relatively simple – it’s a series of crypts and spaces for people and coffins at regular intervals, all of the same size. It’s almost like planning a car park - there have to be aisles for each crypt and then the crypts themselves. There’s a series of galleries where you walk in and memorial walls of polished stone behind which people are buried.”
There were two reasons for concentrating on the detail of textures for the mausoleum, he says. “One was the landscape and the other the surrounding historic buildings which aren’t generally smooth like modern ones. We introduced rich material and texture into the mausoleum to help it blend in.
“The primary texture is memorial stone which is polished, it’s high-gloss like a mirror finish. Stone is a traditional material used in memorials, but we used a granite type that is more of a sandstone-looking material to give a more earthy effect.”
Two colour directions were selected. The first, earth colours to help the mausoleum relate to the landscape and to the roof of the old building, which is made from terracotta tiles. The second colour direction was grey bluestone, a common material for Melbourne and which helped the mausoleum relate to the walls of the Old Gatehouse which are also bluestone. The memorial stone is a grey and off-white toning and the end walls are specially textured brick. “We had these specially made to form a bumpy texture that is like a reinterpretation of the bump texture of the stone on the Old Gatehouse,” Harmer explains. “It’s a rusticated bluestone and our new walls are bumpy bricks, so the texture is similar but the colour is different. We wanted to contrast the end walls with the memorial walls which are smooth, so there’s no mixing up.”
The texture of the roof is dramatic, spanning out from the gatehouse towards the drive in a 110 degree arc which contrasts with the blockiness of the crypts. “The roof is a delicate floating fan that floats and gives the building have a much more delicate overall form rather than a flat roof which would make it look monumental,” says Harmer. “Random apertures in the form of skylights are cut into the fan. The coloured glass in these abstracted cross shapes throw coloured light onto the walls of the galleries, giving life to what could otherwise be a sombre stone wall. The roof itself again picks up the colours of the roof of the Old Gatehouse. The new roof is copper tiles on top and underneath is clear finished plywood, so again, that’s an earthy toning to help it blend with the landscape and old building. The other texture we’ve used here is dark stained timber, which contrasts with the stone and separates the roof from the stone – it’s like an infill panel to help make the roof look like it’s not connected to the stone walls.”
Another feature of the mausoleum is the striking glass roof between the new building and the old.. “This is a special gallery that uses seraphic glass from Pilkington with clear crosses cut out of it,” Harmer says. “The crosses are made of clear glass where the green film on the glass wasn’t printed. If you look up through the crosses, you either see the blue of the sky or the green of the overhanging trees. Where the sun comes through the cross, the light is more intense, so you get little white crosses all over the floor of the old building..”
At night the mausoleum is locked off by three large gates featuring a woven stainless steel mesh. “The gates close over the bricks so it’s texture on texture,” says Harmer. “The sun catches it in the morning and it glints on the stainless steel and throws off the light in different directions.”
The choice of textures and materials was deliberately non-uniform. “We didn’t want to have one thing. It’s a building that’s relatively simple, but we’ve enriched it with colours, textures and details to make it a pleasant place to visit.”n