LA has a housing shortage — not just for the living. Hollywood Forever Cemetery (the burial places of Judy Garland, Alfred Hitchcock, and Quincy Jones) is looking to the future when they’ll run out of space. So they’re building up. Now there’s a new, five-story-tall mausoleum, which the cemetery touts as the tallest crypt in the country, and it’ll be able to store the remains of tens of thousands of people. LA-based architects Michael Lehrer and Roberto Sheinberg created it.
Sheinberg says that the cemetery’s owners called him and Lehrer to ask if they wanted to help put together a master plan to extend the memorial park’s life. They immediately said yes.
Sheinberg adds that working on a cemetery is a dream for every architect, and many don’t get to do it. “Most of what we could do is work for the living. And this is looking into a completely different — not just population, but dealing with the visitors, and dealing with honoring the deceased, but also extending life, and it's creating a different kind of sacred space of sorts.”
Lehrer notes, “I think projects where there are inherent contradictions, where it is decidedly not obvious what to do, are particularly fascinating and exciting. And to take a place of … dying and death, and make it a place of life and life cycles, that's a powerful, good thing to try to solve. And that was, I think, the mission here.”
He points out a particular challenge: “If you make really big places full of dead people, that's not inherently a wonderful thing to have in your community. So how do you make it like anything else, something that will be not just okay, but maybe even beautiful and compelling, and in fact, something that enriches the community and the city?”
Sheinberg says their idea was to do a planted topography that brought the garden out into the neighborhood, which won unanimous approval from the City Council, Neighborhood Council, and Planning Commission. Officials were excited because the project wasn’t a “big concrete box,” he says.
The mausoleum is 100 feet high and 500 feet long, which Lehrer describes as a mound. They’re taking the Hollywood Forever’s pine trees, deciduous trees, bougainvillea, and other kinds of plants — and projecting them vertically. The plants were put in less than a year ago, and Lehrer says he’s never seen them grow so fast.
Lehrer acknowledges that the mausoleum resembles a Frank Lloyd Wright building. Their work also takes inspiration from architects Donald Judd and Louis Kahn, plus ancient structures like mastabas and pyramids.
If you visit a deceased loved one there, you’ll always have views of the city, Lehrer explains.
“It was really about an experience of creating a place where people want to go, where people want to be, and where you can just rest and be with your loved one, but you can also go and not know anyone that's housed in the mausoleum, and still get an amazing experience and really connect with the city,” Sheinberg notes.