The Wilshire Boulevard Cemetery and Museum of Anthropology is a theoretical project only nominally about either cemeteries or museums. Rather, it represents some conclusions about working with “meaning” in the landscape. How does a landscape take on “meaning” to its users?

The cemetery form is a good choice for exploring how a landscape “means,” since it is a place where we, the living, make a final gesture toward our interpretation of death. The Veterans’ Cemetery on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles was selected precisely because this 120-acre site is notably unsuccessful as a “meaningful” landscape. It is nearly flat, exceptionally boring to look at (thousands of uniform crosses uniformly spaced on a green field) and extremely introverted.

The Landscape As A Lens

The site is bounded by the San Diego Freeway on the west, residential property on the north, the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and residential property on the east and by that great commercial corridor, Wilshire Boulevard, on the south. If a landscape is going to have meaning you have to know it is there, so the first object was to open it up. The great trees which effectively screen the cemetery from the freeway on the west will mostly be left in place, but selected specimens are removed to permit views in by the motorists. The panorama of mortality is an appropriate memento mori for the fast lane. The north and east edges are presently chain-link; this treatment will remain, but with additional pedestrial access gates to encourage passive recreational use. The Wilshire Boulevard edge is the location of the new museum of anthropology, to be administered by nearby UCLA.

Form Echoes Function

The cemetery is a museum of forms, a library of types. The uniform field of white crosses gives way to a new blend of two major forms, with sub-types of cemeteries within these. Thus, the perimeter cemetery is in the pastoral form (an original American type), with its sinuous landforms and open views so important to urban dwellers. Here the headstones are bronze plaques in the grass, presenting no impediment either to lawnmowers or early morning Joggers.

Emphasis On Architecture And Urban Companionability

By contrast, the great central portion of the cemetery is shaped as a necropolis, or city of the dead, with its emphasis on architecture and a dense, urban companionability. Variations on these two major forms include the chapel graveyard, positioned on the site’s only “high place”?EUR??,,????'??+made higher by additional fill and buttressed for visual emphasis with a stone wall?EUR??,,????'??+the “ash lawn” and reflecting pool where ashes may be returned directly to the earth by casting them on the grass and the great columbarium which rings the amphitheatre across the bridge from the museum. Here, walls of niches holding cremated remains form a silent audience around the amphitheater’s chamber.

Separating the cemetery from the museum parts of the site is a major roadway which divides the site and circumscribes it. As the visitor crosses by car from the public entries into the cemetery areas, the road passes over streams, suggesting the separation between life and death. From the museum side, one may also cross into the cemetery side over a bridge into the columbarium and amphitheater, again suggesting a journey from life to death (and back).

The major image is that of the museum and cemetery as interlocking concepts, each a metaphor for the other. Focusing on one part elaborates the meaning of the other part. Each part becomes intensified and its meaning more readable to all.

This paper was prepared by Kathryn K. Cerra as a review of her award-winning final project for the certificate in landscape architecture at UCLA Extensiond Department of the Arts.