The Norwegian Cremation Society celebrated the legalization of cremation as a facultative practice in Norway in 1898. This milestone was followed by an architectural competition in 1906, commissioned by the Society to find a suitable design for the country’s first purpose-built crematorium. Leaning on experiences from its international peers, the Society recognized the need for a balanced architectural expression that merged the vague concepts of appropriateness, modernity and tradition. This was essential in order to have the crematorium gain agency on its own and garner support for a changed view on death and funerals. Architect Oscar Hoff eventually ended up winning the competition with his peculiar entry “Monumentum Mortis”. While that project, completed in its first stage in 1909, is a familiar historic building today, it alone offers little insight into the diverse preconceptions and expectations that contemporary society had on crematoria architecture. In this paper I wish to nuance our understanding of that and deliberate on why ‘Monumentum Mortis’ won, by exploring the events preceding the completion of the building, revisit the architectural competition, its numerous and diverse entries, many of which showed significant international influence, as well as discussing the immediate reception of the competition’s results in the professional and public discourse. The paper, which is based on preliminary findings from my ongoing PhD research on the architecture of Norwegian crematoria, draws from international scholarship, archival studies of the Norwegian Cremation Society, and analyses of various contemporary professional journals and newspapers.