David A Garcia, Architecture + Design Portfolio 2022

DAVID A. GARCIA

David A. Garcia

david-a-garcia@outlook.com

740-981-9306

@david.garcia.1

issuu.com/david-a-garcia/portfolio

DIGESTIBLE MANIPULATED NARRATIVE OBJECTS

Film Series and Aesthetical Design Methodology

SCI-Arc Graduate Thesis Project

Summer 2022

Thesis Advisors:

Jeremy Kamal Hartley

Marcelyn Gow

Damjan Jovanovic

This project originated from an interest into the heterogenous complexities and messiness in our decisions, values and their consequences. In everyday life, these experiences are most potent in our digital social platforms, but as well physically in the urban spaces around us. So, with this project, I collapse these concepts into a medium that I can express aesthetically, through architectural objects and cinematic narratives. These cinematics and accompanying architectures aim to embody these messy and complicated phenomena, but through digestible and entertaining ways. The film’s setting and its architectural characters become these surreal assemblages of familiarity that operate as narrative objects to orchestrate the values of these decisions and reactions. The series performs as a piece of appreciation towards our decisions and inthe-moment reactions that happen during and after the fact.

The process to design this speculative world in a concise short film requires a specific architectural method of storytelling. The operative technique is an object-oriented design methodology that focuses on clear, concise, but aesthetically interesting, storytelling descriptions. The design approach can be summarized as “Digestible Manipulated Narrative Objects”, concerning aspects of aesthetics and their ability to convey the narrative in an compelling way. This design approach will be a valuable way to convey a digestible story through visually complex and novel architectures

“DIGESTIBLE MANIPULATED”

Easier decribed through image, it is the designer’s job in producing intriguing aesthetics through legible, distinguishable designs that are also altered and tweaked enough to understand that aesthetic moves have been tastefully performed. Good digestible objects usually happen to be the simplest and most banal of objects. When things are common in everyday life or even cliché, that familiarity creates a digestible object to a common consensus. As designers we can then attempt to hone the use of banality and cliches to create complex and interesting aesthetic reads while providing that clear simplified understanding. The familiar objects go through alterations and transformations, performed often enough so that they become new objects, assemblages or ‘designs’.

“NARRATIVE OBJECTS”

An object/thing that relays a story. A good narrative object expresses a clear narrative, history, and reason within the object itself, and to a common consensus of the audience. A Nike logo giving off an energy of athleticism, quality, or coolness because of the history embedded into that symbol. Balloons exuding an idea of playfulness, party, or celebration, or the color gold reminding us of royalty, luxury, or beauty. Using these symbols to work towards a legible story is the purpose of the narrative objects. I use these - architecturally - to produce form, space, and storyline. The specific process to attractively operate the narrative objects into architecture relies on its aesthetical moves. Those architectural mechanisms are the aforementioned Digestibility and Manipulation.

Film: Scan or Click

HARMONY AT THE SEAMS

Generative Morphologies - Performance Center

SCI-Arc Graduate Design Studio 2

Spring 2021

Instructor: Herwig Baumgartner (B+U)

Harmony is found throughout nature in a multitude of scales, whether in a small crevice or large chasm. These spontaneous spatial conditions of nature are formed intentionally and, many times, unintentionally. These experiences that come from nature inform how the Wild behaves in this performance center, proposed in the southwest sector of Exposition Park in Los Angeles.

The design is an ensemble of parts that try to piece together, sometimes fitting securely, other times not quite connecting. This creates an unstable composition, ready to fall apart, only held together by branching stilts. Viewing the structure from the exterior site, the collection of parts forms a highly apparent visual of components that are stacked, shifted and sheared in an elevational manner. This draws a clear notion to the public of the crevices and interstitial spaces between the ensemble that can be explored for natural harmony and performance. The components are then enveloped by a glitched tectonic, derived from hacking images of natural landscapes and human machineries to create artificial descendants of their textures. Occupiers enter from underneath the unstable components, in a sort of crawl, under these heavy formations to reach the interior. Occupiers then can climb up the ensemble, reaching the education spaces, music libraries or the interior performance theatres. Escalators, bridges, and elevators work to link these components together.

The fragile composition shapes and induces the “Wild” to explore and grow. Crevices are left to be consumed by real and/or artificial members of nature. These wild areas allow spontaneous acts of performance and harmony to exist all throughout the minute spaces as well as the major spaces. This performance center hopes to create experiences from the intentional teacher-tostudent educations to the spontaneous nature-to-student provocations that happen through nature and technology.

FRAGILE UNISON

This architecture tries to live in unison with the wilderness to create these spaces of informal performances as well as informal habitats of nature. The in-betweens of this fragile architecture provide hints at spaces that the wild could inhabit and, in return, the wild provides the harmony and stability needed for balance. It can be said that the ignore-ance of nature would mean the colla pse of an architecture. This human-made ensemble chooses to work with the wild in an effort to create these harmonies, all the while understanding the fragility of their relation.

DAVID A. GARCIA

HARMONY AT THE SEAMS: DESIGN DEVELOPMENT

Integrated Advancement and Documentation of Project

SCI-Arc Graduate Applied Studies: DD Fall 2021

Instructors:

Herwig Baumgartner (Architecture)

Zach Burns (Architecture)

Consultants:

Matthew Melnyk (Structural)

Jamey Lyzun (MEP)

Student Team:

Shichen Cao, Xin Fan, David Garcia(me), Jianli He, Linjun Huang, Shraddha Kemse, Leila Ghasemi, Chunjia Liu, Yufei Guo, Shilong Zhu

Design Development allowed us to further the architectural sophistication of a selection of studio projects from the previous semester. My Spring 2021 “Harmony at the Seams” project was selected; I then acted as the group leader and project manager of 9 teammates. Along with executing decisions and consulting, I additionally worked on the overall construction animations, compiling of the work into a film, and designing general systems and facade assemblies. The work from this DD exploration was composed into a 16 minute film to represent these tectonic advancements in more active and compelling way.

Brief: This course investigates issues related to the implementation of design: technology, the use of materials, systems integration, and the archetypal analytical strategies of force, order and character. The course includes a review of basic and advanced construction methods, analysis of building codes, the design of structural and mechanical systems, environmental systems, buildings service systems, the development of building materials and the integration of building components and systems. The intent of this course is to develop a cohesive understanding of how architects communicate complex building systems for the built environment and to demonstrate the ability to document a comprehensive architectural project and stewardship of the environment.

CHUNK A: OVERALL SYSTEMS

PRIMARY

SKELETON

FRAME

SECONDARY FRAMING AND FLOORING

INSULATION AND CERAMIC CLADDING

CHUNK A: OVERALL SYSTEMS

VEGETATION TILE SOLAR PV TILE

The primary cladding system of this architecture consist of 4 unique tile shapes that puzzle together. This sytsem of 4 tiles piece together throughout the exterior with different glazings to create the patterning of the facade. Following the same tile shape system, plant material tiles assemble onto the facade to provide vertical greenery to the architecture. It consists of a composite substrate within a metal case that attaches to the structural frame and water piping. The tile scheme then applies to the solar PV system. Solar cells are formed into the tile shapes encased in glass and a metal frame that can assemble onto the structural frame. PV tile placements are dictated by the building surfaces that recieve the most sunlight.

CHUNK B: FACADE-GLAZING CONNECTION

CHUNK C: GLASS ATRIUM

1-Minute Animation: Scan or Click

COMPOST SCI-ARC

CLT Implementation - Expansion to the SCI-Arc Building

SCI-Arc Graduate Design Studio 3

Fall 2021

Instructors: Gordon Kipping & Kelly Koh (G-Tects)

The final project took what we learned from the physical midterm research to potentially inform an architectural form. The brief was to design an addition to the SCI-Arc building in Los Angeles, California. The program for this addition is not assigned and would be discovered through urban and site analysis. We researched through issues and provocations around the site and in the state to figure out a programmatic addition that can help/benefit not only SCI-Arc, but the urban context around it. The wood technique researched was then able to be applied to find novel ways of using wood to generate space and form.

This addition looks into how SCI-Arc could extend a pedagogical wing to the public and provide learning experiences and spaces to discover agricultural growth and technological innovation. One half of the building dedicates itself to this public program and the other half provides an expansion to SCI-Arc as a educational institution. New studios, lecture spaces, fabrication upgrades, robot labs are all additions on the 3rd and 4th floor additions.

Due to a worsening climate, one of the major propositions is to extract the mass of unneeded beetlekilled tree from forests as well as other waste that contributes to wildfires. The SCI-Arc expansion can be a place to absorb excess resources from the forest, thinning out dead trees that would otherwise be fuel for wildfires. Planks can used as a structural system and excess bio-waste used as plant compost. With this excess of wood to build with, SCI-Arc itself becomes this large compost piles of wooden sticks, vegetation, technology, and the people that will inhabit.

FLOOR 1 - GROUND LEVEL, EXISTING SCI ARC

FLOOR 3 - ROOFTOP FARM LEARNING + SCI ARC CLASS EXPANSION

FLOOR 4 - SCI ARC UPPER EXPANSION

MINISTRY OF ENVIRONMENT WATER AGRICULTURE, RIYADH

The New MEWA Complex at the Capital of Saudi Arabia

Professional: Architectural Intern at Brooks + Scarpa

2020. 4 Months. Competition (Won 1st Place, to be built)

Location: Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Supervisors:

Angela Brooks, Lawrence Scarpa, Jeff Huber

Design Team:

Flavia Chiste, David Garcia (me), Dio Ichillumpa

Eric Mosher, Iliya Muzychuk, Eleftheria Stavridi, Juan Carlos Villarreal, Yimin Wu

An invited competition for the new Ministry of Environment, Water, and Agriculture in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. I was entrusted by the supervisors to design overall exterior schematics, pre-liminary massing arrangement, roof schemes, and facade aesthetics / tectonics. I worked along side the Design Principal to generate ideas, plan according to the local regulations, and adjust to interior design notes. Leading up to submission, I generated facade articulations through grasshopper, researched local history for the conceptual process and completed a prominent amount of the 3D modeling on the architectural side. This culminated with the client being well satisfied with the design, awarding it 1st place, and to be built.

The MEWA complex is a 1.2 million square foot complex of seven buildings, 3500 cars and a solar system that will generate 75% of the entire energy use of the complex of buildings. Conceived as a tapestry of spaces and landscapes offering connections through shaded outdoor rooms, the “Viale”street and garden courts tie together the entire complex of buildings. Shade provided by the roof canopy with the addition of trees, ornamental planting and cross ventilation will provide a comfortable exterior climate. The ground level will be lined with shops and other public amenities, the courts and walk street connect to the gardens below grade at the subterranean parking level where vertical circulation connects the open spaces above. Gardens and terraces create an indoor/outdoor connection throughout the complex, further connecting this neighborhood. The organization of the space is intended to embrace Saudi culture but also transform the way people live, play and work.

BUILDING PERFORMANCE

JUNE 21 MIDDAY

ROOF PROVIDES SHADE FOR OVERALL PROJECT AREA TO REDUCE HEAT GAIN

PHOTOVOLTAICS PROVIDE ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SOURCE

DEC 21 MIDDAY

FACADE SCREENS TO MINIMIZE DIRECT DAYLIGHT INTO OFFICES

ROOF OVERHANG SHADES SOUTH FACEING FACADE

NATIVE LANDSCAPING AND STORMWATER MANAGEMENT

GREY WATER RUNOFF FROM OCCUPANT USE IS DIRECTED TO DRY WELLS AND RETURNED TO LANDSCAPING

PREVAILING WINDS HARVESTED BY SHAPE AND ORIENTATION OF BUILDING, INDUCING CROSS VENTILATION

MICROCLIMATE BY WATER FEATURES

PHOTOVOLTAICS ALTERNATIVE SOURCE

MICROCLIMATE CREATED FEATURES AND LANDSCAPING

MASHRABIYA WINDOWS

The facade system is inspired by traditional Islamic architecture, where the use of intricate screens and perforations were used to control light and temperature within the building. The precast concrete fins not only serve an aesthetic purpose, but also act as a shading device, reducing the amount of direct sunlight entering the building and thereby reducing the cooling load. The brick patterned façade adds an additional layer of texture and depth to the building’s exterior. The larger reveals on the northern face allow for more natural light to enter the building, while the smaller reveals on the southern face provide additional thermal control. The Mashrabiya facade system is a functional and visually striking addition to the building, providing both thermal and visual comfort for the building’s inhabitants

David A. Garcia

Email: david-a-garcia@outlook.com

Instagram: @david.garcia.1