Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to research Gunnar Asplund's Woodland Chapel (1918-20) in terms of the revernacularization of classicism and to investigate into the matter of the constructional logic. The term 'revernacularization of classicism' was used by Alan Colquhoun to explain the process to return to the pure sources of classical architecture, and the case of a successful fusion of classicism and vernacular traditions was suggested by Demetri Porphyrios through Scandinavian Doricist sensibility in the early 20th century. Porphyrios's classicism, not as style but as sensibility, is premised on a constructional logic of vernacular, and is to achieve an aesthetic quality by its mythical elaboration. Woodland Chapel, a representative of the Scandinavian Doricism according to him, illustrates characteristics of the revernacularized classicism as in the fact that it thickly displays vernacular images at the same time as relying on classicism; in the return to primitive simplicity; and in the mythopoeic power. However, the constructional logic of this building was obscured in the capital of the portico columns, the interior dome, and the whole structure of the roof. Confronting this paradox, we have to remember that although Porphyrios emphasized the constructional logic he opened an aesthetic exit of the mythical elaboration, which is in accord with the concept of the tectonic as the poetics of construction. Woodland Chapel assumes atectonic features but is never anti-tectonic. Asplund intensified a poetic effect by setting the myth over construction in the chapel, and so it can be seen as a key example of the revernacularized classicism with the Doricist sensibility.
