I am a designer and recent M.Arch graduate at the University of Florida School of Architecture. I view design as the medium in which we create thoughtful, iterative, and refined contributions to the built environment. In design I strive to create spaces and develop projects that enhance the occupant’s appreciation for the subliminal environment. I believe that everyone should live a captivating, full life which starts with the spaces and experiences that one encounters. My approach to design incorporates a detail oriented process of observational research, analytical poetry, fluid collaboration, and meticulous development. We’re here for a short time; why shouldn’t that time be thoughtful, dynamic, and earnest?
Ray Wincko
954-225-4103
rwincko43@gmail.com
Gainesville, FL 32603
01 Yamacraw institute of building arts
Program - Educational Workshop
Scale - 22000 sq ft
Context - 2023 | Savannah, GA
02 envision resilience
Program - Cultural | Community Center | Educational
Scale - 3000 sq ft
Context - 2022 | Okahumpka, FL
03 virgil d. hawkins community center
Program - Educational | Gallery | Industrial
Scale - 26000 sq ft
Context - 2024 | New Bedford, MA
04 waldo literary pavillion
Program - Educational | Pavillion | Library
Scale - 3000 sq ft.
Context - 2022 | Waldo, FL
05 Garden stimulus: rawlings elementary
Program - Educational | Design Build Scale - NA
Context - 2022 | Gainesville, FL
06 gimbell conservatory courtyard
Program - Public | Housing | Infrastructure
Scale - NA
Context - 2022 | Manhattan, NY
07 Holy devastator outhouse
Program - Educational Workshop
Scale - 22000 sq ft
Context - 2023 | Savannah, GA
EDUCATION EXperIENCE
M.Arch - University of florida
2024
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
B.design - University of florida
2022
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
VORKURS Research editor
2023 - 2024
VORKURS Publication
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
Studio Coordinator
2022 - 2024
UF Design exploration Program
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
Architectural intern
2020
Gallo Herbert Architects
Ray Wincko
954-225-4103
rwincko43@gmail.com
Gainesville, FL 32603
Pedagogy
Visiting Assistant Professor
Summer 2024
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
Graduate teaching assistant
2022 - 2024
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
UnderGraduate teaching assistant
2022
Received from the University of Florida School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction, and Planning
Awards
alpha rho chi leadership merit award
2024
graduate award for excellence in teaching
2024
james gamble rogers memorial fellowship 2023
cba studio award 2023
ingle family scholarship 2024
arthur bleen anderson scholarship
2022 curricular review presentee
2021-2023
YAMACRAW INSTITUTE OF BUILDING ARTS
In a context of an anticipated vertical expansion, the Yamacraw Institute of Building Arts stands as a screened, stilted volume that hovers above the dilapidated brick shell of a former paper mill warehouse. This is an organizational gesture that acknowledges the ensuing demands of the future vertical development and the molting identity of Savannah’s industrial district while politely reinforcing the historical built environment of this urban threshold. Programmatically, the institute emphasizes experiential learning as the primary mode of education which places the more traditional modes of learning, lecture halls and classrooms, as loose fit objects that sit within and protrude the elongated, decompartmentalized experiential learning hall. This system of loose fit objects is epitomized in the beacon of the project, a slate-clad tower that contains the lecture hall and vertical circulation, which pulls above the cranked rooflline to insert itself within Savannah’s underlying system of smoke stacks that stitch the city’s paramount destinations.
Program - Educational Workshop
Scale - 22000 sq ft
Context - 2023 | Savannah, GA
Studio - Grad 2 | Professor Jason Alread
1
2
1
The concept of a deconstructed program pushed to emphasize the multidisciplinary encounters of the construction and trade field. This approach established a more singular mixed, workshop space that embraces the entropic, happenstance engagement amongst students and faculty. While many programs like studios, workshops, and lounges allow for dissolved boundaries, some programs demands enclosure for the sake ventilation and privacy. This resulted in a series of vertical objects that occupy and pierce the bounding volume. These objects withhold the lecture hall, bathrooms, CNC facilities, meeting rooms, etc. The relationship between object and void materializes in a singular, energetic space of productive exchange intertwined with a system of intermittent volumes that harbor privacy and focus.
Virgil D. hawkins community center
The Virgil D. Hawkins Community Center serves as a spatial proclamation from the citizens of Okahumpka in response to the encroaching edges of corporate development in the region. The community center holds reverence and forms deliberate dialogue with the more sensitive and encompassing context of the adjacent Rosenwald school. The process of development for this project looked to craft a set of spaces that are slightly muted and quiet whilst also facilitating an actively entangled community. The approach of the project is to establish a controlled opaque face of entry followed by a direct, framed reveal of the neighboring Rosenwald context that sits beneath a singular, elongated gable roof. The spatial organization allows for a flexible assembly hall with a set of supplemental spaces that pull or detach from the hall. A bathroom and utility block pulls from the primary structure to be nested beneath the low-sweeping oaks for a moment of privacy. The synthesis of the program is found in the system of steel apertures of interaction which serve as the circulatory, ephemeral, and occupiable thresholds of the larger volume.
Program - Public | Cultural
Scale - 2740 sq ft
Context - 2022 | Okahumpka, FL
Studio - Grad 1: Bradley Walters
Virgil
A critical development in the design process of the Virgil Hawkins Community Center is the system of apertures that allow the external public to engage with the community center and its internal occupants. This study materialized in an exploration of machined and manipulated aluminum that expresses scale, proportion, profile, and connection of assembly in the system. As this system of apertures interjects material modernity in the historical context of the site, the distillation of the system’s presence and programmatic interaction serves as the architectural stitch between the traditional language of the project and a subdued, earnest architectural response.
New Bedford Regenerative Studies center
The approach to this project questions how the civilians of New Bedford can benefit from a possibly fleeting and/or oppressive presence of large, international off-shore wind corporations. Also, how can the individual respond to these extensive developments by subverting the corporation? What knowledge gained from maintenance, recycling, and operation can inform and empower the laborers of the mainland? The New Bedford Institute of Regenerative Building Operation is the final stage in a larger sequence of processing decommissioned turbine elements, maintenance engineers, and analysis. The institute stratifies the core components of experiential learning into a layered mass in which the occupant navigates perpendicular amongst their personalized educational itinerary. The institute educates laborers and the public regarding what alternate energy systems, crafting skills, material systems, etc. they can implement in their dwellings to reduce the reliance on regionally supplied energy from international corporations. This institute produces two regenerative results, the physical building assembly and knowledge.
Program - Educational | Cultural
Scale - 18000 sq ft
Context - 2023 | New Bedford, MA
Studio - Grad 3: Professor Jeff Carney
Waldow Literary Pavillion
The Waldo Literary Pavilion is, at its purest, a room for reading. The response is a lifted volume encased in a set of layered, shifting screens. Due to the orientation of the volume, sheared perforated metal screens enclose the western and eastern faces to mitigate extreme solar exposure whilst still allowing ample light to permeate the reading space. Along the northern and southern faces, the screens peel to reveal views of the surrounding meadow and pull a firmer light to the interior. The entry peels to uncover the primary threshold while a secondary plane pulls to reveal a subdued, sloped secondary entry. The interior of the volume is a double height, illuminated space lined with suspended bookshelves, and a mezzanine occupies the southern portion of the volume.
Program - Reading Room
Scale - 3,000 sq ft
Context - 2021 | Waldo, FL
Studio - Materials: Professor Jason Alread
garden Stimulus: Rawlings elementary
The Waldo Literary Pavilion is, at its purest, a room for reading. The site is a semi-fictional location in Waldo, Florida. The response to these parameters is a lifted volume encased in a set of layered, shifting screens. Due to the orientation of the volume, sheared perforated metal screens enclose the western and eastern faces to mitigate extreme solar exposure whilst still allowing ample light to permeate the reading space. Along the northern and southern faces, the screens peel to reveal views of the surrounding meadow and pull a firmer light to the interior. The entry peels to uncover the primary threshold while a secondary plane pulls to reveal a subdued, sloped secondary entry. The interior of the volume is a double height, illuminated space lined with suspended bookshelves, and a mezzanine occupies the southern portion of the volume.
Program - Educational Workshop
Scale - 22000 sq ft
Context - 2023 | Savannah, GA
Studio - Grad 2 | Professor Jason Alread
The Rawlings Garden Stimulus and culinary classroom incorporated a process of intense community and client involvement. A series of informal interrogations and relationship building meetings were held throughout the development of the project. This involved an enlightening set of interactions with the students at the school in which they conveyed what they felt was missing from the school along with some more direct engagements with 1:1 models. As most of our on-site work was conducted after school hours, we built a strong relationship with a group of after-care students who served as the voice of critique for the larger student body. This relationship between the design process and community engagement was critical to form a successful, earnest response that provides for the students and staff.
Regarding materials, the surface edges and anything touched is composed of cedar that will silver as it witnesses the harsh Floridian sun. The majority of the structure and bends are pressure-treated pine that should withstand moisture. The footings that lift the cedar decks off the ground are cast concrete with steel U-post fasteners. These three materials synthesize into a singular identity that will harbor the program of the project.
Gimbel’s conservatory courtyard
The Gimbel’s Conservatory Courtyard is a responsive, semi-public space that serves as the filter between a newly reincorporated subterranean pedestrian corridor, an NYU Student Study Center, and the surface level of the renovated Penn Station. As a field condition, this architectural response implores an auditorium and an educational garden that receives commuters, loiterers, and tourists in their personal itineraries throughout Manhattan. A set of greenhouse vitrines serve as occupiable thresholds at the primary entries of the courtyard. These thresholds facilitate an exchange between a sunken public space and the surface level commotion while providing moments of pause, exposure to nature, and education as each vitrines displays a different environmental issue. This approach deconstructs and enlivens the nomenclature of the traditional subway entry. Older subway portals are claustrophobic, dark, and dangerous labyrinths that oppress the occupant. The Gimbel’s Conservatory Courtyard exposes these traditionally rash spaces to copious greenery and natural light whilst providing ample community space for possible markets, gatherings, events, and movements.
Program - Public | Infrastructure
Scale - Urban
Context - 2021 | Manhattan, NY
Studio - Design 7: Professor Nancy Clark
floral vitrine : [pollination]
Biome presents a collection of flora and fauna that are critical in the process of pollination and the plant reproduction process.
- Star Flower (Lysimachia Borealis)
- Cow Parsnip (Heracleum Lanatum)
- English Daisy (Bellis Perennis)
- Goldenrod (Solidago)
- Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia Nicolai)
wetland vitrine : [biodiversity]
Biome presents an articulate and diverse collection of flora and fauna that promote sustainable and responsive landscape in design.
[biodiversity]
- Slender Monkey Flower (Mimulus Leptaleus)
- Moira Grass (Pseudoraphis Spinescens)
- Honey Locust Tree (Gleditsia Triacanthos)
- Sand Cord Grass (Spartina Bakeri)
- Gulf Toadfish (Opsanus Beta)
- Mayan Cuchlid Fish (Mayaheros Uropalymus)
tropical vitrine : [deforestation]
Biome preserves a plethora of classified, endangered or native plant species of tropical forests that are prone to deforestation
- Pink Trumpet Tree (Handroanthus)
- Heliconia Flower (Latisphatha)
- Rafflesia (Rafflesia Arnoloii)
- Ti Plant (Cordyline Fruitcosa)
- Bird of Paradise (Strelitzia Nicolai)
Holy devastator outhouse
Along rural roads, miles lie between bathrooms. Travellers strain their bladders and mental fortitude in attempts to convincing themselves they can “hold it”. The bathrooms that do provide relief along these roads make little attempt to stimulate space nor respond to it pastoral environment. There is opportunity, especially in the context of a bucolic Florida landscape, to insert another variable to the bathroom’s realm of exchange. The bathroom, specifically the toilet, may engage and unveil this context to establish a sincere relationship between the intimacy of stigmatized space and the enriched infrastructural threads that occupy the land.
The Holy Devastator is an outhouse that is a singular component of a larger set of infrastructural interventions. They may exist in many contexts, and with each context, a different organization follows. The primary principles of the Holy Devastator are to catch, maneuver, and frame the context in efforts of reconnecting the occupant to their senses in their moments of vulnerability and loneliness.
Program - Privy | Public
Scale - 120 sq ft
Context - Bucolic Florida | Infrastructure
Studio - Charlie Hailey + Bradley Walters | PILOT
Gesturally, this outhouse contains a horizontal organization of a ramp screened from context that leads to a suspended watercloset module. The volume sits upon a cast blade that becomes a vertical edge which blocks outward sight. The screened edge that mediates between movement and sitting runs vertically upon entry. Once the toilet volume emerges, the edge wraps the toilet module to become a visor of sorts, framing the horizon.
The human experience that generally requires a partial disrobing, one that ends around the ankles, is the exchange that occurs with the toilet. The diagram of this program intends to establish a connection between the human and context. As the user occupies the space one is exposed, in a mutual relationship, to its direct pastoral context. The earnest engagement between the vulnerable body in pensive introspection and the outreaching expanse of an infrastructural horizon intertwines two seemingly disconnected conditions of ordinarily cyclical rhythms. Once the user relieves themselves, they bask in the extracted afternoon sun during the vigorous washing of their hands.
This shithouse is directly reactionary to its immediate locale in terms of positioning. It’s placement along the larger infrastructural thread of US-301 depends on the vacancy of its program. This specific condition is the offshoot after the merging of US 441 into US 301, somewhere vaguely south of Reddick, FL. This line runs between recognizable municipal names; the lonely structures that occupy this domain are entirely transitory besides the few sweeping cattle and horse ranches. This stretch of road has pre-existing provisional and advertising structures, so the newly introduced shit house is isolated for it is all the land demands.
It lifts off the ground with a slung belly as if it grazes upon the grass beneath its volume. Its orientation strategically intends on catching travelers and redirecting their sight line outwards to the cross-grain of landscape. The approach to the enclosed privy affects sightlines, and filtered vision, creating a new perspective towards movement and the surrounding environment. Once the user occupant arrives to the suspended volume, they are revealed to a reframed horizon, withdrawn from the bombardment of humanity’s spoils. The thousands of travelers that drive this road are bound to fusing their necks to look at the monotony of the road. As a moment of relief, the shit house pulls, redirects, and spews the attention of weary eyes.
