Rethinking Remembrance at Lakewood Cemetery’s Net-Zero Welcome Center
The soon-to-be-completed project will break new ground in both programming and energy performance
By Justin R. Wolf | March 21, 2024
The curving pedestrian approaches from the west skirt a fountain. The Welcome Gardens invite respite and reflection. Rendering by Snow Kreilich Architects and Ten x Ten.
2023 PRINT ANNUAL
This feature appeared in the 2023 ENTER print annual, available for purchase here.
The 250-acre Lakewood Cemetery in Minneapolis’s Chain of Lakes area hugs stretches of Lake Harriet and Bde Maka Ska. Its rolling hills, adorned with seas of headstones, monuments, and lawn crypts, are home to some 200,000 souls, including local luminaries such as Hubert Humphrey, Bobby Marshall, Lena Olive Smith, and T.B. Walker. Like all great civic landscapes, the cemetery’s grounds are a careful composition of expansive vistas and manicured pockets that continually draw one’s gaze and calm one’s nerves. They are also complemented by some rather stunning architecture.
The Harry Wild Jones–designed Memorial Chapel, built in 1910, is a Neo-Byzantine wonder, especially from within, where its walls and soaring rotunda are gilded in mosaics made from more than 10 million miniature tiles. A few landscaped tiers down from the chapel sits the HGA-designed Garden Mausoleum, completed in 2012—a subdued place of warm marble and light that feels both cavernous and intimate. Soon joining these celebrated structures will be Lakewood’s all-electric, net-zero-energy Welcome Center, slated for completion this spring.
The notion of a cemetery having a welcome center may seem odd to some. It’s a “radical idea,” says Snow Kreilich Architects’ Matthew Kreilich, FAIA, the design principal on the project. “It’s a new paradigm. Lakewood is rethinking the visitor experience in a significant way.”
A More Inviting Character
Currently, Lakewood’s staff works out of the cemetery’s 1929 Administration Building, a stately Greek Revivalist structure set atop a plinth and fitted with columns. Snow Kreilich’s Karen Lu, AIA, NOMA, one of the Welcome Center’s designers, notes that the Administration Building is “often mistaken for a mausoleum.” Its rigid stone exterior, while attractive, isn’t exactly welcoming, and inside, a deep, chest-high counter partitions the foyer from the work area, a physical manifestation of bureaucracy at work.
Winding paths guide pedestrians past the Administration Building (right) to the Welcome Center and Gardens. Rendering by Snow Kreilich Architects and Ten x Ten.
Lakewood has outgrown the building in both staff size and outlook. “We originally considered expanding our existing space—we could have made that work,” says Lakewood president Chris Makowske. But with the organization’s desire for greater community engagement and a more sustainable future, Lakewood pivoted to a new welcome center. They engaged Snow Kreilich Architects, Miller Dunwiddie, and Ten x Ten as their design partners.
Makowske cites a passage from T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. “‘We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time,’” he says. “We’re a place where people come to remember and find meaning.” Reflecting on what remembrance means to different people leads to pondering what a cemetery is really for, he says. “How do we engage with the community and invite people in?” he asks. “How do we advance the whole notion of remembrance?”
Sited east of the Administration Building, the new two-story, 25,000-square-foot Welcome Center will feature flexible spaces for community events and classes, including legacy writing workshops, art therapy and meditation classes, seminars on different philosophical perspectives on death and dying, and much more. (No memorial services will be held in the building.) The evolving syllabus will be curated to consider “remembrance from different angles,” says Makowske—an approach that aligns with Lakewood’s nondenominational history.
“Lakewood is a place that needs to look forward not five to 10 years but 50 to 100 years. Memorialization is changing, and Lakewood is looking beyond their traditional offerings.”
Expanded office space will accommodate a minimum of 32 employees with room for growth. On the main floor, the light-filled reception and family services area, finished with natural wood accents and earth tones, will be a welcome change from the dim halls in which staff currently work.
Outside, the center will be clad in a durable combination of Flint Hills limestone and thermally modified ash wood, and wrapped in a modern colonnade that recalls the Administration Building’s Grecian pillars but with a more inviting character.
Visitors drawn to the Welcome Center’s engaging design and programming will feel just as good about its environmental performance. No fossil fuels or on-site combustion will be used to power, heat, or cool the building. A rooftop solar array, currently sized at 120 kilowatts, will accommodate most of the building’s daily electricity needs, aided by daylight and occupancy sensors that reduce power loads. And the building will be heated and cooled by a groundwater-sourced geothermal system.
Opting to install a traditional geothermal system to accommodate the center’s projected heating and cooling needs would have required drilling approximately 60 wells—a precarious proposition for an historic cemetery, considering the many graves. As an alternative, the project team turned to a game-changing technology from Minnesota-based Darcy Solutions. Darcy Solutions’ geothermal system installs a proprietary heat exchanger into the aquifer, tapping its capacity to store and create energy; the exchanger feeds into a closed loop that connects to the building’s HVAC system. What makes the system optimal for Lakewood is that it generates between 20 and 50 times the amount of energy per well compared to a traditional borehole. This benefit translates to drilling two wells on-site rather than dozens.
The reception and family services area, finished with natural wood accents, looks out to the fountain. Rendering by Snow Kreilich Architects and Ten x Ten.
“Getting to net-zero is no easy task,” says Kreilich. “It takes commitment from everyone on the team.” He cites Lakewood’s “history of innovation” as being instrumental in fostering that commitment.
“A cemetery project striving for net-zero energy demonstrates a commitment to bettering the surrounding community for years to come,” says Molly Eagen, AIA, founder of Cause, the project’s sustainability consultant. “An enduring goal for an enduring place.”
Reflection, Remembrance, and Transition
Surrounding the building’s large footprint—which remarkably required the removal of only seven trees (113 new ones are being planted)—is an ambitious landscape program by Ten x Ten. The Minneapolis firm designed walking paths and four drought-resistant gardens that will effectively reshape Lakewood’s northeast section. The vision for the Welcome Gardens, as the firm calls it, is threefold: places for reflection, remembrance, and transition. Ten x Ten cofounder and principal Ross Altheimer cites historical precedents like Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. “They have these amazing welcome zones, places of transition between the city and the gardens,” he says
Lakewood’s current transition from city to cemetery is abrupt. Visitors arriving via the main entrance are greeted by the monolithic Administrative Building, a sort of sentry at the gates. While a future use has yet to be assigned to the nearly century-old building, the new landscape will soften its edges with plantings and curvilinear paths that subtly direct visitors to the Welcome Center and its gardens. “We’re changing the entryway, but within the organic geometry that exists,” says Ten x Ten senior associate Egle Vanagaite.
The north-facing entry offers a convenient drop-off for vehicles, but the landscape-forward Welcome Center has no parking lot. Rendering by Snow Kreilich Architects and Ten x Ten.
Altheimer’s involvement with Lakewood dates back more than a decade; he was part of the interdisciplinary HGA team that designed the award-winning Garden Mausoleum. Altheimer says cemeteries have become an even more relevant civic institution over the past few years. “We need these places to remember, find community, discover wild nature,” he says. “Some of the first public spaces were cemeteries. And the idea of civic space as an important public asset was revived during the pandemic.”
That historical perspective is important. Lakewood, established in 1871, was part of the Garden Cemetery movement, which saw cities designate tracts of land at their rural edges for the interment of the dead. In addition to addressing the challenges of urban graveyards having reached capacity and the related risk of cholera and typhoid outbreaks, these scenic landscapes were the country’s first public parks. Lakewood was laid out by famed landscape architect Adolph Strauch and C. W. Folsom, superintendent of Mount Auburn Cemetery—the first garden cemetery in the U.S.
“We asked ourselves, ‘How do people come to cemeteries to mourn, to grieve, but also to celebrate?’” says Vanagaite. “‘And how do you layer all that into the design of the gardens?’” The fluid walking paths will reflect Lakewood’s relationship to the two nearby lakes and highlight native plantings, perennials, and pollinator and bird habitats that thrive in biodiverse settings. Above all, the plan aims to align with how the cemetery was designed to function from the start.
While cars are welcome on the grounds, Lakewood will have no parking lot. The road system surrounding the Welcome Center is being altered and reduced, reserving most of the site for the gardens and, in Altheimer’s words, “preserving the legacy of the tree canopy.”
“We need these places to remember, find community, discover wild nature. Some of the first public spaces [in this country] were cemeteries.”
“Lakewood is a place that needs to look forward not five to 10 years but 50 to 100 years,” says Miller Dunwiddie associate principal Denita Lemmon, AIA, the Welcome Center’s project manager. Miller Dunwiddie has a long history with Lakewood, including work on the Memorial Mausoleum and crematorium. Over several decades, Lemmon has witnessed the evolution of Lakewood’s priorities. “Memorialization is changing, and Lakewood is looking beyond their traditional offerings,” she says.
Kreilich cites a growing movement of garden cemeteries seeking to become leisure centers for families and destinations for cultural events. With the Welcome Center, “Lakewood will become a reference point” for other cities, he says.
Makowske has expressed a desire for the Welcome Center to be “a sustainable model within a place that’s honoring its natural surroundings.” A community building that produces at least as much energy as it consumes is not only such a model; given its surroundings, it’s also a fitting metaphor. For those who come to Lakewood to plan, to mourn, or simply to enjoy a stroll in the park, the Welcome Center will be a gateway through which, in the words of T.S. Eliot, people may come to know the place for the first time.
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