This degree project explores how spatial design can engage with grief as an ongoing, material, and bodily process. Based on years of work as a cemetery caretaker, the project examines how natural materials; particularly soil and dead elm wood, can be used to shape spaces that support mourning not as a linear journey, but as a cyclical and sensuous experience.

The work emerges from a phenomenological approach to space and care, where landscapes are understood through the body and through time. Rather than proposing a permanent monument, the project focuses on transformation, decay, and maintenance as central to both grief and architecture. The research has been conducted through situated material practices; including excavation, carving, forging, and seasonal tending, as well as theoretical and poetic writing.

The project culminates in a design proposal for Danderyd Cemetery: a sequence of handrails shaped from diseased elm trees, a cut into the ground, and a maintenance plan that centres care as architectural practice. By blurring the boundaries between gardener and architect, life and death, object and landscape, the project proposes a more open, slow, and tactile approach to memorial space.

The contribution lies in rethinking spatial design through grief, time, and material transformation; suggesting that architecture can care not by controlling, but by staying close to what is already in motion.