Diana Franco BA Architecture Portfolio 2015-16

[ Diana Franco ] Portfolio 2015-2016 Bachelor of Arts, Architectural Studies

Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design // University of Toronto 2 Prospect St. Toronto, ON M4X 1C6 // (647) 869 - 5473 // diana.francocamacho@mail.utoronto.ca

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[ Contents ]

Pair 1. Form ................................

Trinity Bellwoods Bath House

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Seven Rooms

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Pair 2. Transform .......................

Chair Fabrication Exercise

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Corktown Co. Market Hall

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Pair 3. Repurpose ........................

Shipping Container Plaza

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The Public Living Room

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Architecture Materials: Paper, foam, wood, plaster

Individual Project / Academic Date: Summer 2015

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Pair 1. Form [ Trinity Bellwoods Bath House and Recreation Centre ]

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This exercise consisted of designing a new public recreation centre and bath house for Trinity Bellwoods Park, located in downtown Toronto. The design was intended to be a reinterpretation of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, my precedent study. Four different formal strategies were tested, taking into consideration programmatic requirements, existing site topography, access to natural light, and pedestrian circulation (including accessibility requirements).

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In the Pergamon Museum, archeaological fragments of ancient Persian and Roman architecture are inserted inside a modern building envelope; thus creating a “building within a building�. In my interpretation for the Trinity Bellwoods Bath House and Recreation Centre, two very different geometries intersect each other - a cone within a cube-, replacing the duality of modern vs. ancient with a dual geometric vocabulary.

New Site Area

Trinity Bellwoods Bath House, Toronto Ancient

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Pergamon Museum, Berlin

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Site: Trinity Bellwoods Park, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

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Final form

Inspiration: Baya weaverbird nest found in Namibia. Background photo: Animal Architecture by Ingo Arndt (2014)

Formal and Massing Strategies

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First Floor Plan 1 Swimming Pool 2 Exercise Room 3 Public Hall 4 Auditorium 5 Bathrooms

Second Floor Plan 6 Frigidarium ‘Cold Bath’ 7 Tepidarium ‘Warm Bath’ 8 Calarium ‘Hot Bath’ 1 9 Calarium ‘Hot Bath’ 2 10 Changing Rooms

Circulation diagram

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Pair 1. Form [ Seven Rooms : Spatial Arrangement Experiment ]

Conceptual Design

Materials: Paper, pen, pencil, copper

Individual Project / Academic Date: Winter 2015

The project consisted of allocating seven rooms within a 12 x 12 meter space subdivided by four load-bearing walls. The walls could not have openings more than 2 meters wide. Influenced by Piet Mondrian’s grid and painting systems, I worked from the plan, arranging the rooms according to visual symmetry and balance. The squares were shifted 60° and 45°, and extruded 6 meters to form the walls. An additional system of squares (post and lintel) was added to meet load-bearing requirements.

Axonometric, plans, and sections (hand drawing)

Sketch Model

Final Model

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Design Process (hand drawing)

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Pair 2. Transform [ Chair Precedent Study & Fabrication Exercise ] Precedent study: ‘Spin’ stool, designed by Daphne Zuilhof Fabrication of full-scale prototype: Diana Franco Part of a Chair Design and Fabrication Continuing Studies course at OCAD University

Furniture Design and Fabrication Materials: Baltic birch plywood, leather

Individual / Non-academic Date: Fall 2015

I built this stool by repeatedly watching a Vimeo video of the folding / unfolding process, found on Zuilhof’s website (there were no drawings available). I sketched out the leather connections. Then I proceeded to model the stool in Rhino to obtain the wood dimensions & angles.

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Fabrication Process

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Pair 2. Transform [ Corktown Commons Market Hall & Community Garden ]

Architecture Individual Project / Academic Materials: Wood and concrete Date: Fall 2015

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Dining Hall and Café

New Site Area

12 min Modular market furniture

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Present = Food Desert Condition

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Second Floor Plan Grocery Stores within a 15 minute walking distance from the site

Permanent Food Market

The idea of designing a Market Hall comes from a mapping exercise in which I determined the distance from the project site to nearby grocery stores. Given the lack of major food sources in the surrounding areas (food desert), I concluded that a Market Hall and Community Garden would be two necessary programs for the community of Corktown Commons (east end of downtown Toronto). These amenities would also act as social spaces for the nearby residential developments.

The Market Hall building is envisioned as an entirely wooden structure. There are four components to the market: an open air pavilion that houses the temporary food stalls (weekend farmer’s market and special events), the permanent food market (grocery store), and the public washrooms accessible to the users of the nearby skatepark. The fourth area is a Café which is located on the second floor.

Central Pond

Temporary Food Market Public Washrooms

First Floor Plan

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Japanese joinery fabrication study: Prototype of modular and transformable market furniture (benches and tables)

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Influence for the community garden: photographed landscapes of Edward Burtysnky. I intended to exaggerate the landscape design model to emphasize the process of ‘carving of the earth’

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Pair 3. Repurpose [Shipping Container Plaza]

Urban Design Imagined site: Gastown, Vancouver, BC

Individual Project / Academic Date: Summer 2015

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This exercise began with the design of a public plaza through a two-dimensional collage (raster approach to design), and then moved into digital modeling, culminating in the fabrication of the plaza as a three-dimensional physical object. The imagined site of the plaza is a parkette on Vancouver’s Gastown neighbourhood. I collected several images of shipping containers from other markets with an industrial aesthetic (Brooklyn, NYC; and Puebla, Mexico) to form an arrangement that is enclosed, stacked, and has a combination of hardscape and softscape. The plaza is populated with shops, formal and informal seating, and a multiplicity of different social activities.

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Site Plan

East Elevation

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Pair 3. Repurpose [ The Public Living Room ]

Installation Group Project / Academic Site: Glasgow Street Parkette, Toronto, ON Date: Fall 2014

Through this installation, we offered a critique to a conventional public park by informally programming it with abandoned furniture and books. The driving ideas of the project were domesticity and domestication of space. Using objects associated with the private realm, we created a sharp contrast between these objects and the public context. We proposed that as new users interacted with the abandoned books and furniture, our project was not only a place of interaction for the local community, but it was also a metaphorical bond between strangers across time and space.

Glasgow Street Parkette

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Diagrams of Park Usage

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The Public Living Room - Data interpretation

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Monday November 3 - Before the intervention

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The parkette is located within a residential neighbourhood slightly distanced from the bustling Chinatown. The narrow streets and alleyways adjacent to the parkette do not connect directly to major streets and intersections, therefore the parkette is (usually) inaccesible to high pedestrian traffic.

During our observations and data collection, we noticed that the users of the parkette consisted primarily of the residents of the neighbourhood, and a few homeless people. Before our intervention, people mainly used the parkette as a quiet space for reading, smoking, and talking over their phones. This installation popped up overnight and became a popular topic among the neighbours.

On Day 5, we were lucky enough to witness the moment in which a City of Toronto truck was carrying away every single object that made up our intervention, even the books.

By midday, there was no trace that the installation ever existed.

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Intensity of Use Friday November 7 - After the intervention

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Team Diana Franco: idea and orchestration // van rental and harvesting of furniture // 80% books // set up // data collection and interpretation // furniture map // photos Ruby Liu: 20% books // data collection and interpretation // diagrams of park usage Special thanks to Luisa MartĂ­nez for helping during set up

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THE END Thank you

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