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PARK AND CEMETERY. 
PRIZE COMPETITIVE DESIGN FOR GERMAN CEMETERY 
The city of Pforzheim, Germany, 
recently instituted a competition for 
plaas for an enlargement of the city 
cemetery and for an elaborate group 
of administration buildings that 
should include a crematory, and the 
first prize design with its detail draw- 
ing of the buildings is illustrated 
here. The proclamation announcing 
the competition called for plans for 
the erection of a funeral hall to- 
gether with a crematory, and for the 
enlargment of the cemetery. 
The total cost should not exceed 
what cities similar in point of size 
and development to Pforzheim are 
wont to spend for their cemetery 
buildings. This mode of limiting 
the cost, however, has not proved 
itself a good one, since, it produced, 
in this competition, at least, the most 
widely dififering results — all the way 
from 480,000 to 1,500,000 marks. At 
any rate, the working out of this 
project would have been considerably 
easier had definite limits been placed 
on the total cost. By the terms of 
the competition, the competitors were 
given free rein as to the division and 
arrangement of the land, with only 
this one restriction, that the exist- 
ing family vaults and monuments be 
spared and the walks lined with the 
old trees be retained as far as pos- 
sible. 
The entire plan was to be made 
with this end in view that, with a 
simple utilization of the new portion 
of the cemetery and a like re-utili- 
zation of the old, it would fill all the 
needs until the year 1950. In an ap- 
propriate place the establishment of 
ash urns in the open was taken care 
of. To serve as a means of guid- 
ance to the competitors, and to elim- 
inate as far as possible the numerous 
eccentricities of cemetery formation 
often noted, the following fundamen- 
tal principles were laid down: “The 
cemetery as such should be capable 
of attaining the best possible re- 
sults, and the purpose of it, the prac- 
tical usefulness, the attaining of the 
highest percentage of utility, should 
not be lost sight of in the striving 
after external effects out of all har- 
mony with the central idea of the 
cemetery. 
The first prize design was that of 
Architect Menzel, of Dresden. The 
designer of this starts out with the 
problem of creating some central 
point around which all the rest can 
be grouped and to which all must be 
subordinated, in order that a har- 
monious whole may be achieved. In 
the cemetery this is represented by 
the wide main street which has its 
origin in the front part of the closely 
massed building section. 
FIRST PRIZE DESIGN FOR IMPROVEMENT OF PFORZHEIM CEMETERY 
ARCHITECT MENZEL, DRESDEN, DESIGNER. 
