On a glorious day some weeks ago, I went to the Chapel Hill Gardens West Cemetery where this chapel is located. It is in Oakbrook Terrace, not Villa Park, as Alan Artner seems to think. Located on Roosevelt road, just west of Route # 83, very easy to get to.
According to the cemetery's literature, the chapel was built in 1926, not 1928, as Mr. Artner has in his list, but I'm not going to quibble over two years. The great bronze funerary urn ( 5'6" in height) was created by Richard Bock, and is a masterpiece, in this humble person's opinion. Apparently Mr. Bock was a long-time collaborator with Frank Lloyd Wright, but this urn and chapel are pure Art Nouveau, I think.
Mr. Hippach built this chapel to memorialize and honor his parents, but curiously, they are not buried inside, but rather outside, in the back.
The owners of the cemetery have recently renovated the building, and it shows. All of the figures are snowy white and clean. The tile on the inside floor gleams, and the windows are sparkly. All is now in immaculate condition. However, the outside dentals, which surround three sides, do seem inappropriate to this period, and I have to question whether they are original. They appear to be of coarse granite , not in keeping with the mottled gray and brown granite of the exterior walls. And beautiful they are too.
On the urn, located just outside the portico, are found relief heads of Christ, Mohamed, Moses, Buddha, Shiva, Thor, Zeus, and Isis. A most catholic array of religious figures. Under these heads are representations of Maternity and Childhood, Education, Labor, Enlightenment, Love and Life, Harvest, Old Age Victorious, and Parting of the Thread of Life (these names are taken from the booklet I obtained from the office).
Most impresive are the four figures that crown each corner of the chapel, north south, east, and west. They have been dubbed "The Watchers". Cut in white marble, they represent reflections on Life and Death.
I particularly liked the expressions cut into the belfry walls on the north and south sides:
"Lest we forget that the main current of our will is still like the green moving waters and our reasoned choices like the flutter of foam of its surface."
"Lest we forget that out of wild nature we are come, that our instincts are great, our wisdoms little."
To me, this chapel is perfectly wonderful, and the reason I have been so long in posting about it, is that I have about decided to have my ashes put in it. The cemetery people, in restoring the building, put glass cases across the east end of the interior, on both sides of the entrance, and they are not very expensive, by today's inflated funeral costs. I had been thinking about what to do for some time now. My family has had some decidedly adventurous funeral experiences, to say the least. My father's ashes were thrown down on the track as the horses of the Kentucky Derby were thundering past. My mother's body was driven, in her casket of course, by my husband and me in our Chevy van, down to Louisville, Kentucky, where she spent the night until we could inter her the next morning.
I think the funeral industry has gotten out of hand, and any way I can cheat them out of the thousands of dollars they gouge from us, I will. I do love to roam cemeteries, however, and read all the gravestones, and look at all the various expressions of art to be found there. So much spent on the dead, but so much history there too. So I was thinking of having a gravestone, and I told my sons that it should say "She read 'Ulysses' twice".
Then I was thinking about the new and coming, I hope, green movement, where bodies are simply laid in a white shroud, and put in the ground, in a forest-like place, and allowed to decompose as nature intended. Relatives themselves can even dig the grave.
But then I came to the Hippach Memorial Chapel, which, see, I would never have done if not for my obsessive-compulsive nature. Going through Alan Artner's public art list. And now I think this is the place for me, because I so love architecture and old beautiful buildings, and this way I can have some hand in keeping it restored, although I am sure I threw the rep for a loop when I asked to see the legal literature on keeping this building in repair for hundreds of years in the future. Laws and owners change.
I am rather excited about it, although I, like all the rest of humanity, simply cannot imagine not seeing the next dawn. But here, I loved, not only the building, but also the great urn, with its multiplicity of beliefs, I, who have none.
2 comments:
Guess you did not know about the giant Iron Eagle that used to be painted on the main face of the memorial, or even the "Nazi" swaztika's and iron crosses in the tile.
Keep in mind that the chapel was built long before Hitler!
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