PORTFOLIO DANIEL MECCA
TABLE OF CONTENTS
The Cube Room and Garden La Tourette The Lightbox Door Window Stair Casa De Canoas Ruin Project Tower Desert Florida landscape
The Cube This project defined the way I saw and designed space. By using basswood linears, bristol planes and MDF, I created cube that sits on all six sides and also produces many levels of space and depth within. I used the MDF as an armature system and the planar and linear systems worked off of it to create diverse and dense area of space within the boundaries of this 9 inch by 9 inch cube.
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In order to get to my final model, I went through multiple process models to figure out the hierarchy and density of the spaces I wanted to design into my final representation.
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Room and Garden Similar to the cube, this is a project in used to study space in an abstract way. Room and Garden, though, focuses on itinerary. There are three nodes in the model that are connected through a series of plexiglass and basswood systems that symbolize the directional movements someone would take through the model.
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In this “timeline of movement�, I used perspective drawings to project what it would look like in different parts of my model. Then I shaded them and connected them through tone. The tonal connections are placed in a way that show the motion taken to travel from node to node.
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This itinerary connects to two other perspectives. The tone reaches straight up in order to get to that other portion of the walk through and that correlates to how a person would move from this place to that. It also connects to the node on the right by going up and then right and, like the other, that is the path one would follow in the model. 11
Architectural Analysis In this project, I analyzed La Tourette, designed by Le Corbusier, and the buildings ability to emphasize the scalar difference of one person in the collective. Each plan greets the monks that live there with a whole new sense of scale as the work from the top, where it pin-points the needs of the individual monk, to the bottom, where multiple monks can cross paths on their way to different activities. In the end, that pyramid of scale fits into the rest of the building giving a sense of hierarchy to one monk in the midst of many.
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The Lightbox In order to study lights affect on the atmosphere of a space, I designed and created a model housing 4 spaces connected by an aperture. The aperture collects the light from the outside and carries it to each space. The light is not direct though, it is diffused behind pieces in order to give each node a sense of depth. The final model, shown to the right, was created using basswood linears and bristol paper.
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Door Window Stair Door Window Stair, as the name implies, is a step away from the abstract nature, seen in The Cube and Room and Garden, and towards a more realistic idea of itinerary and threshold. As hinted at through the perspective renders, there isn’t just a human itinerary. In order to experiment with the scale of thresholds I designed an elephant itinerary that interacts with the human itinerary yet remains a separate one.
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My design takes full advantage of perspective. As a person walks around the “suspended walkway�, they are met with a series of frames that hide and reveal the elephants below them as well as set a pace around the walkway. I also experimented with material in this project by using mylar to play with light along the walkway and work with the frames and stairs (as seen below) as another perspective changing device.
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Inspiration: When beginning the project, I began with pictures of elephants in a blank room that had a reflective floor. What really stood out to me was the reflection. So to start my project I created a collage using the images and began to build models based off of it. I noticed that in a reflection, there is a crisp, darker object and a blurry less opaque object separated by a void. I chose to capitalize on this in my model. I designed the walkway of the elephant to be a reflection of the humans by placing the void in between them and the human walkway itself even acts as a compressed void between two nodes.
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Oscar Niemeyer’s Casa De Canoas This project was designed to force us to use multiple computer programs we learned I started the project by producing the sections and plans for this house, designed by Oscar Niemeyer, in AutoCAD and then used them in Sketchup to create the 3D model. I then moved it into Rhino and there I added materials and then used Brazil to render the interior and exterior shots. The last step was to use Photoshop to make small adjustments and create environments.
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Ruin Project This project began on the University of Florida campus where there is a “well” piece brought in from Italy. First we needed to design a “suitcase” able to transport the well to a chosen spot in the Piazza San Marco. After designing this and diagramming maps of the Piazza, we began to manipulate the large 24” x 36” diagram into a space that welcomes the suitcase to the site. By doing this I stumbled across the idea of reflection through the canals and the flooding waters that is very native to the Venice culture, especially our site. Through this idea of reflection I created “reflecting” spaces on left and right side of the model that held the transported well and a staircase respectively. The stair leads people up to the top allowing them to look out across the canals as well as down to admire the structures reflection in the water.
Tower Like most things, Tower began as a mapping diagram. I took a map of London and made multiple diagrams connecting patterns as well as different historical and poverty maps to create the two collages below. I began to create hierarchy and spaces within the diagrams and build them vertically to begin to define the look of my final tower. This project taught me the importance of scale as well as designing connections around multiple materials.
Desert After finishing tower, I began working on this project by researching and analyzing different desert landscapes across the world. Afterwards I diagrammed not only the land of multiple deserts but also the sky since it is so brilliant in such empty regions. The project forced us to create a building in the middle of the desert that provided a stopping place for nomads and the rest was left up for interpretation. I decided to design a religious temple for people wandering the Sahara desert. Since I placed it on the bank of the Nile river, the building ended up being the starting point of a journey along the Nile. The facade is very influenced by the river including areas that are open for people to look out over it. The inside is mainly built into the ground providing natural shade and insulation from the heat outside. Areas like the worship temple and certain thresholds are influenced by the sky and the stars giving the building a program, specific to worshiping celestial phenomenons.
Pavilion1 : Restroom and Dining Facilities
Florida Landscape This project was designed to move us towards building in places that we can feel for ourselves. After a trip to a beach on the west side of Florida, we began designing pavilions that could be occupied by specific activities. The facade for my pavilions was influenced by the kayaks I saw when visiting the beach. The frosted glass, diamond-shaped pieces work to disperse light throughout the building while also grabbing it when the sun is overhead. While slightly changing in each building, this facade design is continuous throughout the three pavilions I created. These shapes are then translated onto the ground allowing for gathering opportunities outside of the pavilion.
Pavilion 3 : Dog Park
Pavilion 2 : Kayak containment
By keeping the facades similar in each design, the buildings connected each part of the beach together and allowed for a seamless flow into the rest of the landscape. By carrying specific ideas to the ground around the pavilions, I was able to register the design of the buildings to the surrounding area including the water, palm tress, and the sand dunes. This project taught me the way buildings should be a part of the landscape not just objects that sit on top of it.
Daniel Mecca University of Florida Undergraduate