SCI-Arc

Undergraduate Thesis 2025 project by William Madsen with advisor Russell Thomsen.

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5 buildings one cemetery

In confronting death, architecture is compelled to articulate something beyond itself: an otherworldliness that resists simple functional or aesthetic resolution. This thesis, composed of five buildings distributed across a new cemetery proposal in Woodland Hills, California attempts to inhabit that territory of ambiguity. It seeks a condition where constructed objects can operate on the thoughts of a viewer if they pay close attention, to find an equilibrium where architecture, in its quietest form, begins to register as something transcendent.

Cemeteries have long been privileged terrains for architecture’s most rigorous meditations on time, memory, and the limits of form. A cemetery is not merely a site of programmatic necessity; it is a charged terrain where architecture must negotiate between the finite world we inhabit and the intimation of something beyond it.

The project consists of a groundskeeper’s house, a crematorium containing a small chapel and columbarium, a hilltop celebration structure, a flower kiosk, and a machinery shed that supports the ongoing care of the grounds. These buildings are modest in program but intentionally disproportionate in conceptual weight. Each building's individuality becomes a vessel through which questions of ritual, memory, re contextualization and temporality are examined and questioned. Together they form a dispersed architectural field that does not illustrate the metaphysics of death but quietly, insistently, frames it, while portraying a meditation on my current design sensibilities.

The project is equally shaped by abstraction’s desire to build meaning not solely out of physical presence but out of structure, reference, technique, and cultural intelligence—what might be understood as an architecture whose true form exists both in the world and beyond it.

Within this conceptual structure, the five buildings serve distinct roles. The house for the groundskeeper grounds the project in domestic time—routine, repetition, ongoing care. It is intentionally unspectacular, a counterweight to the solemnity of the surrounding grounds. The crematorium, chapel, and columbarium occupy the opposite end of the spectrum: thick, withdrawn, austere and slow in their spatial progression. These spaces rely on the choreography of arrival and the modulation of enclosure to craft an atmosphere where the material world begins to feel tenuous, where abstraction and embodied experience act upon one another inseparably. (continued in comments)

“Architecture is fundamentally about understanding the world around us. Travel studios enable students to encounter different cultures, landscapes, and built environments in ways that shape their thinking as designers. The Mangurian Fellowship plays an important role in making these experiences possible for SCI-Arc students, and we are grateful for the community that supports their journeys. Thank you so very much for your support” - Winka Dubbeldam, Director & CEO, SCI-Arc

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Pictured: Michael Rotondi and Robert Mangurian in 2019 sharing a photograph of a SCI-Arc Graduation in 1989. Photo credit: Mary-Ann Ray.