D3 2021 UF Portfolio

Fall 2021 Professor John Maze

University of Florida Samir Mujtaba College of Design, Construction, and Planning Design III

Table of Contents

Interludes is a set of ruins extracted from a larger ruin in Edinburgh, Scotland. While surveying Edinburgh, the noticeable armature of the greenery and the space it created caught my attention. This lead to the intent of creating unique and diverse spaces to capture the essence Edinburgh casts out to my mind. Throughout the model, space is defined through intensity, thresholds, fragmentation, compression and expansions, along with a framework that promotes procession throughout the model.

The Wall of Light is designed with the intent of creating smaller scale moments of shadows created by light in a large scale area. This allows for the shadows to primarily affect the areas that people would be in most. To coincide with the vast open space, outside these smaller moments, the structural wood beams extrude up more than the rest to create large scale shadows in the open area. It focuses on the shadows as there is no light without shadows and each shadow forms the essence of the light.

The Wall of Books serves to be a secluded area of knowledge, aside from the rest of the model. The primary area of knowledge contains a large wall with diagonal shelving that holds multiple books and scrolls. While the large wall holds books of great importance , the open shelves in the middle serve as walls to divide the space without enclosing the space of the readers. On the bottom of these shelves is a seating system to connect each reader as they enter their own world within each book. Fragments of this seating system are placed throughout the entire model to create a feeing of unity as you travel.

A large part of the Wall of Entry is thresholds. Throughout my model are various elements that represent thresholds, primarily being part of the ruins, however the modern aspects create various miniature thresholds to assist defining the space. The excessive use of stairs conveys each opportunity there is for a threshold. While doing so, the stairs also serve as a means of movement as there are diverse opportunities to travel throughout the model, with a path traversing through the wall of Maps.

The wall of Maps is meant to provide the feeing of Edinburgh through the use of large scale tectonics derived from Edinburgh and the previous diagrams. While between the masses, a unique feeling is brought about helping define various parts of Edinburgh. Not every path is able to be tracked upon, viewers are only able to look through these tighter spaces to get a sense of what’s ahead.

Wall of Light

Wall of Entry

Ruins Interludes

Door, Window, Stairs Impurity

Impurity is a model that focuses on the fragmentation of memories and how not all memories are as pure as the mind believed. While studying the film Memento, which is about a man who suffers from a condition where he is unable to form a memory after an incident. While trying to solve that incident, he finds himself being his own enemy. This led to the intent of creating a diverse space that would provide a unique experience to those that inhabit the model. While traveling through the model, the inhabitants are meant to have a false sense of security as they travel around the model, reforming, and documenting memories. The further they go, the more these memories turn out to be skewed and potentially altered by someone else. When leaving the sturdy mass of the model onto the linear system, the truth is revealed through the framework that the source of the impurity was from the inhabitants themselves.

When entering the space, a feeling of compression is provided, only to lead to an open atrium serving as the beginning of this journey, as well as a place to store the fragmented memories. It’s not until the inhabitants travel through the stairs, that the obstacles become present. The feeling of compression is repeated in this moment as they either have to go around this element, or squeeze under. The walkway then ends and attempts to obscure the inhabitants of the truth. When coming upon the window, the viewer is able to experience different memories they documented. These memories are documented as enlarged microscopic slides that are used in biology, to recapture the essence of being within one’s mind. Some of these slides are missing and some are broken, allowing the viewer to make their own interpretation. When traveling back upon the framework system of the model, the smaller microscopic slides reveal the truth, and that these fragmented memories are not as pure as they were meant to believe. Entering back into the model changes the entire perception of the inhabitants. Now the documented slides on the framework system are revealed to be a loop, especially when viewed from the perspective of the black glass plane, which reflects the slides.