Charles Holden is better known for his wonderful London Underground stations, yet, between the years of 1918 and 1928, the architect designed no fewer than 67 military cemeteries for the soldiers killed in the first world war. I recently went to see one in Bienvillers, south-west of Arras in northern France.
A deeply moving work, Bienvillers has the power to stop you in your tracks – not through any ostentatious grandstanding, but through its quiet profundity. Sited in modest farmland, the cemetery features the inevitable rows of near-identical white headstones marking the graves of soldiers, known and unknown, including those from the second world war as well. There's a Cross of Sacrifice, designed by Reginald Blomfield, a Stone of Remembrance by Edwin Lutyens and two perfectly pitched pavilions by Holden, where the names of the dead are registered, nothing more.
For me, this is an architectural holy grail. Here, Holden created a rove as elemental and as eternal, in its own modest way, as the neolithic stones of the Ring of Brodgar in the Orkneys, or the Greek temple at Segesta. Holden's pavilions are simple box-like structures, the 20th-century equivalent of ancient temples – reduced to the essentials of wall, roof, window opening, pillar, door. They are made of rubble walls, with columns and lintels supporting smooth-cut stone roofs; their geometry and proportions are platonic. These pavilions feel essential and timeless.
I hope to find these qualities in every building I go to look at and write about. It's not that I want them all to resemble a cemetery or a memorial, but I find it thrilling when I come across something – be it a school, a factory, a place of worship, a Tube station – that could be a lasting memorial for our own age and endeavours. I see this in the work of contemporary architects such as Peter Zumthor, Caruso St John, Tadao Ando, Oscar Niemeyer and Alvaro Siza. But, no matter how lucidly their fine buildings speak for our times, the haunting cemeteries of Major Charles Holden will always have the final word.