ハリウッドの新たなランドマークとなる垂直型霊廟

© TIM GRIFFITH

© TIM GRIFFITH

アメリカのハリウッドに建つ〈ガワー霊廟（Gower Mausoleum）〉は、多くの伝説的な俳優が眠り、市民にとっての文化的拠点でもある「ハリウッド・フォーエバー墓地」に建設された新たな霊廟です。

地域の新たなランドマークであると同時に、22,500の地下納骨室と30,000の遺灰用ニッチを追加することで、墓地の寿命を50年延長する建築です。共にロサンゼルスを拠点とする建築事務所Lehrer ArchitectsとArquitectura y Diseñoが共同で設計しました。

注目ポイント

• 高さ30mを超えるコンクリート製モニュメント
• ハリウッドの象徴として、生者と死者をつなぐ特別な空間
• まち並みを劇的に変貌させる巨大な片持ち梁
• 壮大な遺跡を思わせる「ヴォイド」と「ソリッド」の構成
• 文化イベントや祭典を通じて、地域の活動を支える拠点

（以下、Lehrer Architectsから提供されたプレスキットのテキストの抄訳）

© TIM GRIFFITH

© TIM GRIFFITH

ハリウッドの中心にそびえ立つコンクリートのランドマーク

ロサンゼルスの象徴であるハリウッド・フォーエバー墓地は、垂直型霊廟プロジェクトの第1フェイズが完了したことを発表した。この霊廟は、最終的には5万人以上のロサンゼルス市民の永遠の住処となる予定である。

この記念碑的な増築により、22,500の新たな地下納骨室と30,000の遺灰用ニッチが追加された。これにより、墓地の寿命はさらに50年延びることとなり、この墓地の都市における象徴的かつ文化的側面を強化する建物となることだろう。

© TIM GRIFFITH

〈ガワー霊廟〉は、高さ30mを超えるコンクリート製の巨大なモニュメントであり、吹き抜けの通路と階段状の庭園が特徴となっている。この霊廟は、世界で5番目に古い映画スタジオ「パラマウント・スタジオ」がある北半分を占める街区を完成させる。

ハリウッドサインとの直線上に位置するこの霊廟は、光と新鮮な空気、そして市街地やその先のパノラマの景色に満ちた公共の場として、死者、その訪問者、生者、そしてハリウッドのコミュニティ全体を称える文化的・精神的なランドマークとなるだろう。

© TIM GRIFFITH

ロサンゼルスの文化的拠点「ハリウッド・フォーエバー墓地」

ハリウッド・フォーエバー墓地は、ロサンゼルスに位置する53エーカー（約214,500m²）の歴史的ランドマークであり、造園家ジョセフ・アーンショウ（1831-1906）によって設計され、1899年にハリウッド墓地として一般公開された。

19世紀初頭の芝生墓地の計画を象徴するこの墓地は、フェンスや柵を排除し、開けた景観、牧歌的な風景、散策や思索のための曲線を描く小道を重視した設計思想により、まちの文化の要となってきた。

© TIM GRIFFITH

今では伝説的な存在となっているさまざまな人物が眠っているハリウッド・フォーエバー墓地は、1998年に現在のオーナーによって窮地から救われた。
周辺地域の人々にとってより手頃な埋葬オプションの提供、デジタル追悼フィルムなどによるサービスの現代化、屋外映画上映やフリーメイソン・ロッジでの文化イベント、フェアバンクス・ローンでの大規模コンサート、35,000人以上が参加する毎年恒例の「死者の日」の祭典など、墓地は文化の拠点へと変貌を遂げたのである。

墓地を運営するハリウッド・フォーエバーは、ロサンゼルス市民および将来の世代に墓地を提供し続けるため、30年以上にわたり地域社会に根ざした事業を展開するLehrer Architectsに墓地の拡張を依頼した。

© TIM GRIFFITH

地域を象徴する墓地を未来につなぐ〈ガワー霊廟〉

霊廟は、周囲に広がる墓地の平坦な公園のような環境を補完し、またそれをアレンジした垂直のランドスケープとして構想されている。この霊廟は、伝統的に地上階と地下階に広い面積を必要とする業界において、限られた地上空間を救うための建築家たちの革新的なアプローチを示している。

亡くなってから数年も経つと、故人を訪れる人が少なくなってしまうことを踏まえ、設計チームはロサンゼルス市民にとって訪れたい場所であり、世代を超えて訪れる場所となることが不可欠だと考えた。

© TIM GRIFFITH

まちや故人への親しみと畏敬の念を喚起する霊廟

2013年に始まった霊廟の設計では、ドナルド・ジャッド、カール・アンドレ、アンディ・ウォーホルといったポップアーティストによる連続性のデザインから、エドゥアルド・チリーダのシンプルかつ大胆な立体・空洞彫刻、メキシコや古代ペルシャのジッグラトやマスタバに至るまで、幅広いインスピレーションがチームによって取り入れられた。

通りに面したコンクリート打放しの外観は、堂々としたボリュームに質感を与える装飾的な幾何学模様が施され、地下納骨堂の前面に配された滑らかな花崗岩の石とのコントラストを際立たせている。

© TIM GRIFFITH

各階で「ヴォイド」と「ソリッド」が交互に配置され、視覚的な質感の層が形成されている。巨大なボリュームが深い影を落とす開放的な回廊の明暗は、人々の記憶に点在する巨大な遺跡への畏怖を喚起する。

地下納骨堂の前面は、全体として調和が取れ、かつそれぞれの回廊に場所のアイデンティティと道順を示すよう選ばれた、さまざまなブラジル産の珪岩で仕上げられている。屋上の納骨堂とインフォメーションセンターには、特注サイズの御影石ブロックが使用されている。

© TIM GRIFFITH

この建物には閉ざされた空間がほとんどなく、開放的で新鮮な空気と自然光に満ちている。 まちを見渡すバルコニーは、宮殿やモニュメントの展望台などから着想を得たもので、360度の眺望が楽しめる屋上庭園や遊歩道とともに、訪れる人々に一息ついて畏敬の念を抱く瞬間を提供している。

建築家たちは、オープンな回廊を通して視覚的なフレームに焦点を当て設計しており、墓地の公園のような敷地、市街、木々、パラマウント・スタジオ、ハリウッドヒルズ、太平洋、サンゲーブル山脈、そしてハリウッドそのものといった特定の限定された景観をつくり出した。

© TIM GRIFFITH

構造的には、この建物は背が高く、比較的狭く、非常に重い。重量のある棺を収容するために頑丈なコンクリートで建てられており、棺は8段重ねで各階に配置され、各階の高さは20フィート（約6.1m）となっている。

各納骨室は、厚さ3インチ（約76mm）の垂直および水平のコンクリートスラブで形成されており、建物全体にハニカム構造をつくり出している。巨大な片持ち梁がガワー・ストリート上空に浮かんでおり、パラマウント・スタジオのステージの高さと連続する印象的な都市景観をつくり出し、ありふれたロサンゼルスのまち並みを、重要な場所へと劇的に変貌させた。

© TIM GRIFFITH

この極めて開放的な設計を維持するためには、キャンチレバーに高度なエンジニアリング技術が必要であった。

このプロジェクトの構造エンジニアであるBrandow and Johnstonは、このプロジェクトに携わった5人目のエンジニアであり、オリジナルの設計を妥協することなく実現できる唯一の人物であった。

© TIM GRIFFITH

© TIM GRIFFITH

以下、Lehrer Architectsのリリース（英文）です。

HOLLYWOOD FOREVER CEMETERY UNVEILS VERTICAL MAUSOLEUM, A SOARING CONCRETE LANDMARK IN THE HEART OF HOLLYWOOD

Designed by Los Angeles-based firms Lehrer Architects and Arquitectura y Diseño, Gower Mausoleum will provide eternal housing for the next generation of Angelenos

Los Angeles’ iconic Hollywood Forever Cemetery has unveiled the first phase of its new vertical mausoleum, one that will eventually provide eternal housing for over 50,000 deceased Angelenos. Designed by award-winning, Los Angeles-based firm Lehrer Architects LA, led by AIA Los Angeles Gold Medalist, Michael B. Lehrer, FAIA and completed by Roberto Sheinberg’s Arquitectura y Diseño, this monumental addition will extend the life of the Cemetery another 50 years by ultimately adding 22,500 new crypt spaces, along with 30,000 niches for ashes, in a building that both enhances and celebrates the cemetery’s iconic cultural presence in the city. Gower Mausoleum is a towering 100-foot-tall concrete monument featuring open breezeways and a stepped-garden streetfront completing the historic Cemetery’s north half of a full city block with Paramount Studios to the South. On axis with the Hollywood sign, it will serve as a cultural and spiritual landmark that honors the dead, their visitors, the living and the entire community of Hollywood as a public space filled with light, fresh air and panoramic vistas of the City and beyond.

The Hollywood Forever Cemetery, a 53-acre historic landmark in Los Angeles, was originally designed by noted landscape architect Joseph Earnshaw (1831-1906) and opened to the public in 1899 as the Hollywood Cemetery. Emblematic of early 19th century lawn cemetery planning, the site eliminated fencing and barriers, favoring open views, bucolic landscapes, and curving pathways intended for strolling and contemplation—a design ethos that has made it a cultural mainstay in the city. Brought back from the brink in 1998 by the current owners, Hollywood Forever Cemetery is the final resting place of legends like Rudolph Valentino, Cecil B. DeMille and Judy Garland, to more contemporary icons like Johnny Ramone and Chris Cornell. The Cemetery was restored and revived, creating more affordable burial options for the surrounding community, bringing services into the modern age with digital films of remembrance and transforming the cemetery into a cultural hub with outdoor film screenings, cultural events at the Masonic Lodge, large scale concerts on the Fairbanks Lawn and the legendary annual Día de los Muertos celebration with over 35,000 attendees.

Hollywood Forever approached the Lehrer Architects LA team to expand the cemetery so it could continue to serve current and future generations of Angelenos. For over 3 decades the firm’s work has been rooted in the community, providing shelter and housing for the city’s residents, making them natural partners to bring this iconic LA landmark into the next generation. Roberto Sheinberg worked with Michael B. Lehrer for 10 years at Lehrer Architects LA. With Lehrer as Design Principal-in-Charge and Sheinberg as Director of Design, they teamed closely to design the Mausoleum as built. Sheinberg’s firm AyD founded in 2021 has since seen the project through construction as well as detailing the design and drawings for the remaining phases.

The mausoleum is conceived as a vertical topographical landscape both complementing and riffing on the surrounding cemetery’s flat, park-like setting. It demonstrates an innovative approach from the architects to save the remaining scarce ground-floor real estate in an industry that traditionally requires much surface area on – and six feet under – ground level. Given that people often stop visiting the deceased within a few years of their passing, the team felt it was imperative to make it a destination of desire for Angelenos and a place to which generations would return.

Design for the mausoleum began in 2013 with the team drawing on far-reaching influences from the seriality of Pop Artists like Donald Judd, Carl Andre, and Andy Warhol’s stacked Brillo Pads, to Eduardo Chillida’s stark and bold solid/void sculptures to the ziggurats and mastaba from Mexico and Ancient Persia. The street-facing exterior of the poured-in-place concrete building displays decorative geometric patterns that give texture to the imposing volumes and contrast with the smooth quartzite stones that front the crypts, alternating between void and solid on each floor to create a layer of visual texture. The chiaroscuro of huge volumes shaping deep shadowed open corridors evokes the awe of massive ruins that dot our collective memory. Crypt-fronts are finished with a variety of different quartzites from Brazil, selected to work harmoniously as a whole whilst providing location identity and wayfinding to the different corridors. Custom dimensional granite blocks were created for the rooftop Columbarium and the Information Center. With virtually no enclosed spaces, the building is open and drenched in fresh air and natural light, with a profound openness to the elements that facilitates passive ventilation and natural breeze. Contemplative balconies looking out onto the City, inspired by the miradors and belvederes of great palaces and monuments, allowing for moments of pause and awe for visitors along with a rooftop garden and promenade with 360-degree views. The architects focused the visual framing through the open corridors, creating specific contained views of the Cemetery Park-like grounds, City, trees, the studioscape at Paramount, the Hollywood Hills, the Pacific Ocean, the San Gabriel Mountains, Downtown Los Angeles and Hollywood itself.

Structurally the building is tall, relatively narrow and extraordinarily heavy as it is built with solid concrete to accommodate weighty coffins, stacking them eight to a floor with each floor soaring 20 feet high. Each crypt is formed with 3-inch vertical and horizontal slabs of concrete creating a structural “honeycomb” through the whole building. Huge cantilevered volumes hover over Gower St, creating a memorable urban boulevard contiguous to the soundstage elevations of Paramount Studios, radically transforming an average LA street into a place of consequence. In order to maintain the extreme openness of the design, the cantilevers required significant engineering smarts. Brandow and Johnston, the Structural Engineers on the project, were the fifth engineers to work on it and the only ones who were able execute without compromising the original design.

“This project is about HOME. It is about community and the places which shelter the body and nurture the soul. It is a place of memory and prophecy. Sharing a city block with Paramount Studios and watched over by the mountaintop Hollywood Sign just north, Hollywood Forever Cemetery is a profoundly Hollywood place that is at once ephemeral and enduring. This fully exterior place of literal and figurative gravitas–chronically drenched with fresh, sublime Pacific breezes and endless, expansive views–achieves a verdant lightness of being by being doused in a reverie daylight and its deep shadows. It is the full process of life, death and renewal rising proud in the center of Hollywood.” Michael B. Lehrer, FAIA, Founder & Principal of Lehrer Architects LA

“Our experience with dense urban projects, combined with a deep understanding of housing principles and the importance of open, park-like spaces, shaped our process and approach from the very beginning by creating a rhythm of dense concrete towers for interments, thoughtfully balanced with open, expansive spaces that celebrate both life and our city.” Roberto Sheinberg, AIA, Founder & Principal of Arquitectura y Diseño

Fulfilling the architects’ vision of the building as a topographical landscape, award-winning landscape architecture firm Studio-MLA’s design builds from ground-level gardens to intimate, vertical terraces, culminating in a rooftop garden with expansive city views. Each landscape layer is woven into the architecture’s geometry, grounding the structure in the natural environment, and enhancing visitors’ experiences. Visitors entering the ground-level are greeted by calming water walls and a curated selection of lush, evergreen trees, shrubs, and grasses. At the upper levels, a series of terraces flank the mausoleum’s corridors, offering moments of respite amid mid-level planted niches. Vibrant Bougainvillea blooms, low carpets of Rosemary, and the iconic form of Italian Cypresses create a backdrop that accentuates the architecture’s façade, evoking a layered, ethereal experience and creating a stepped garden that is visible from the street and the city beyond, growing up the length of the building and breaking out towards the sky. Over time, these tall, geometric concrete volumes will be covered by vines becoming city-scaled, multi-story topiary hedges. The rooftop garden brings in earth-toned materials that harmonize with the surrounding landscape, with four Blue Palms and an allée of mature Olive Trees. The powerful silhouette of the building and its planting builds on the exuberant silhouette of Hollywood Forever landscape and the juxtaposition of concrete and nature is visually and conceptually representative of the city itself.

As Studio-MLA president Mia Lehrer, FASLA, notes: “We aimed to create spaces that draw visitors into quiet reflection, connecting them with nature—a reminder of the enduring and the ephemeral.The walls remind us that water holds a particular resonance here in Los Angeles, and around the world, as a vital force that invites contemplation.”

Phase 1 of 5000 crypts and 8000 niches was completed over 4.5 years and is now being populated. Phase 2 will begin construction in Spring 2025, adding a further 6500 crypts and close to 10,000 niches, with Phase 3 following with 10,000 more crypts and 12,000 niches to complete the 400 ft long and 160,000 square foot structure.

Gower Mausoleum at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery is located at 6000 Santa Monica Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90038

Project Credits
Owner: Hollywood Forever Inc.
Architects: Lehrer Architects LA, Roberto Sheinberg Arquitectura y Diseño
Landscape Architects: Studio-MLA
Structural: Brandow and Johnstone (Main Structure and Crypts), Nous Engineers (Architectural Features Engineering)
Lighting: KGM Architectural Lighting MEP: Jordan & Skala Engineers Geotech: Geotechnologies Inc. Civil: Truxaw & Associates
Shoring: Shoring Engineers / Structural Shotcrete Systems, Inc. Permit Expeditor: TDA Consultants
Contractor: Hollywood Forever, Inc.
Land Use Consultants: Craig Lawson & Co.
Land Use Attorneys: Sheppard Mullin / Alfred Fraijo

About Lehrer Architects
Michael B. Lehrer, FAIA, founded Lehrer Architects LA in his native district of Los Feliz in Los Angeles as a Sole Proprietorship, in 1985. The business, now a California Small Business corporation, is thriving in its award winning office space at 2140 Hyperion Avenue. Lehrer Architects’ approach to design grows out of a deep love and respect for the community and unwavering focus on its improvement. Michael Lehrer has developed a unique relationship of an architect’s communal role: a leader, using design to improve quality of space and quality of life. Our professional team brings expertise in designing, managing, master planning, and collaborating with diverse clients and projects throughout Los Angeles and beyond, emphasizing a passion for design and making. The firm, its people, and their experiences are all very much rooted in the various neighborhoods and communities. Our design approach breathes vitality and delight into the spaces we create. Whether projects are commercial, residential, or institutional, public, or private, the practice focuses on the making of home and community – from individual to family to neighborhood to city, creating spaces that sanctify the rituals of life. lehrerarchitects.com

About Arquitectura y Diseño
Arquitectura y Diseño is an architecture and design studio based in Los Angeles. We believe architecture is a catalyst for change for individuals, communities and the planet. Our wide range of design expertise spans a variety of housing typologies – from single-family homes and Accessory Dwelling Units to supportive housing for families and un-housed individuals – along with institutional projects, work with nonprofits, community organizations, and spiritual and educational organizations addressing all aspects and facets of life. Our passion is to shape a more sustainable, resilient, and equitable world through innovative, collaborative design focused on our clients’ and end users’ needs, while embracing the need for urban densification and of maintaining and restoring the natural environment. Our name, meaning ”Architecture and Design” in Spanish, reflects our belief that diversity and inclusion are integral to innovative and responsive design solutions. It also speaks to our international training and global thinking, always grounded in a deep connection to site and community. We are committed to building design teams with many perspectives, teams that understand the world we live in and have a strong vision for our future. arq-y-di.com

Lehrer Architects 公式サイト
https://www.lehrerarchitects.com/project/hollywood-forever-cemetery-gower-court-mausoleum

Arquitectura y Diseño 公式サイト
https://www.arq-y-di.com/projects/gower