Systems Glitch:

“Something, maybe everything, is very very wrong.”

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Outside Inside:

MICA Undergraduate Senior Thesis

The term landscape conjured up many things in the mind, most of which (at least for me) were far from the dutch-root definition of the word “landschap” which loosely translates to landscape in relation to humans. Herein lies my focus:

All I knew, and really still only know first hand, is my relationship with landscape; It started with a barn and some horses. It started with recognizing patterns in a vernacular of architecture and land management that seemed to widely not pay any regard for the true users of said structures (the horses).

My work begins to challenge the meaning of the word landscape, and who landscape is designed for. I started at a barn, and found myself analyzing how landscapes frame existence, and eventually specifically my existance. Below is a series of images that loosely frame what my undergraduate senior thesis at MICA came to be about-- a journey to splice together two different experiences of home: mountains out West and suburbs in the East. To express on the Outside what I felt on the Inside: a split dichotomy and deep need to better understand why I felt the way I did in each space and place. Each experience is framed by the context of it’s landscape, and each landscape expressed via paper. PDF booklets (that include a bonus page not in the online published version!) are avaiable upon request. To view the full book online please follow this link:

https://issuu.com/antoniaday/docs/outsideinside-antoniaday_2_

The Book:

Printed with BLURB and designed via InDesign.

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City Painful:

Experimental Drawing

Using Rhino I generated a model from which I captured drawings and pushed them through several rounds of Photoshop and Illustrator editing (pictured below). Next, I took this same model, and draped several surfaces over it, which then where split into a large grid (each square would be about 3ft. to scale).

After I generated several mini foam models from this secondary process, I decided the best way to manifest the emotional quality of these drawings in reality was by using jello. By casting “jello bombs,” and “exploding” them around Baltimore city, the effect was similar to that I had created with the RHINO models: something gone wrong. The site of each jello bomb explosion corresponds to a place I had felt these very intense emotions of decomposition.

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The Dream Ponies:

a children’s exhibition about the power of sleep.

The project was inspired by the children’s picture book titled “The Sleep Ponies.” The two levels of the barn-like structure are emblematic of the main character’s journey through the book; as the audience takes the role of the little girl main character they enter and first are prompted to take off their shoes, pass through the first level of “reality,” (a fairly controled experience complete with audio-visual effects), climb the steps to “the dream,” characterized by it’s more open plan and playful interior and soft playing blocks, and then must exit back the way they came.

Above: complete presentation boards appr. 24x36

Above: final render for the entry “shoe drop,” and exploded picture book on the wall, and “reality” experience. Rooms are blocked with walls of glass and lit up at varrying times as visitors pass through. Audio-effects also play in the background: “narrating from the book” in a sense what the viewers are seeing and experiencing. The dream ponies are first introduced here but are also behind glass.

Above: final render for the top level “dream world,” each zone corresponds to the space-timeline of the book. The exact opposite kind of experience as the first floor, children are prompted to play and engage in their own imaginations in a light-filled room. Ride-upon horses as well as an access/seating ramp transect the top floor in a large “X” shape.

Above: the structure for Dream ponies is based from a barn and “exploded” in this model to get a sense of barn construction.

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The Death of Two T-Shirts

“To mark your body on Treviso, and to mark Treviso on your body.”

Created during a summer intensive abroad in Italy, and inspired by Joseph Bueys, I decided to finally let go of two t-shirts I had packed with me throughout the entire summer, but never wore. I hammered 5 L-nails through the shirt and into the crumbling wall of an abandoned building in the corner of the city, and weighted the shirt with cobblestones taken from the mainstreet.

The nails, my action, will mark this wall until the wall itself is destroyed.Me, and my shirt, will fade from existence. The weight of a creative vision will be released, and forever alter this space.

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Matchbox Treviso and
Roman Water Meditations.

More from Italy summer travels, one piece attempts to capture a section of the city of Treviso (the same section as the previous t-shirt piece) and capture it in a matchbox. Within my “zone,” was an old church filled with Sacred Heart metals in a piaza surrounded by porticos. And thus my mathcbox was born. Cuts to the top and bottom as well as to the front cardboard cover allow for viewers to not only open the box but also pear in and still get glimps of gold and color. Matches burned on site.

Below are sketches of my Roman water meditations - also meant to be an “artifact,” of sorts of one of the many cities we visited. One drawing is totally from direct observation, another is half observational and half imaginative, one a map interpretation, and one a “letter to the water pipes,” doused in the fountain drawn in the observational drawing.

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Dutch Polder Design

A collaboration between MICA and Deltares Water Company.

Located in the Markermeer lake in the Netherlands, the site was originally supposed to be built out as a polder in the 1970s. We decided to adopt the location as ground 0 for our “visionary polder experiments.” (EDITED in 2021 to add the following:) Only years later now looking back upon the decisions made do I understand what exactly I was trying to do: decentralize the human narrative of built Earthscape. My intentions (however maybe not so succesful or realized) were to mimic and facilitate ecology and create a “bio-machine” of sorts, as opossed to building for human habiation. This mission of course is inherently flawed, due to the original inspiration of form (a scape that was the by-product of human use) as well as the final intended project mission of a polder (a thing and place built solely for human inhabitance). The project none the less produced some amazing drawings.

I first started my studies with drawings (both photoshop and analouge) of observed patterns within the local and immediate landscape. Eventually, I began to collage micro-structures of dutch plants into the site, initially inspired by the “cellular” and modular nature of the Vinkeveense plassen landscape. The finished project is modular in nature, meant to better aid the continuous expansion and shrinkage of city and agriculture. Down the center is a flood-park to also double as a pedestrian green space. Below is a slideshow sample of the many types of drawings I generated, and below that are the three collage drawings that most inspired my final design.

Below is the sketch that most captured the essence of what I wanted to create: a modular landscaping system.

Below that are three foam and clay models of slightly larger-scoped landscaping as it applies to my modular system. Models were water tested.

Below are images of the two exhibitions for this project: to the left is an image of my posters and the show in Deltares HQ in Delft, Netherlands, and the other image on the right is of my posters and a model displayed in a show in Baltimore, Maryland.

Above my three presentation boards for the project. Each roughly 24x60 in.

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Fabrication Experiment:

Baltimore Bike-share and RHINO Vaults.

Inspired by the Armadillo Vault at the Venice Biennale, I worked with RHINO Vaults software to generate a self-supporting surface inspired by the predestrian walkways near an abandoned bikeshare station. The physical structure as it exists in RHINO can be xamined and manipulated via a force diagram generated by the Vaults software, and vice versa the force diagram can be manipulated by the altering of the physical model. Below is a slideshow of the work for this piece, from sketches, to sketched diagram, to force model, and to final surface model.

Above is a section of the final surface. Below is a collaborative data visualization exercise done by our entire class; each “spoke” of the wheel is a different abandoned or semi-abandoned bikeshare station and it’s site conditions (ground surface, city location, orientation, solar exposure, foot traffic levels, etc.)

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Tectonic Design Exercise:

A House for a Painter.

The first ever complete design project of mine with a set mission and program: a house for a painter. Within my design, the studio is at the heart of an architecture inspired by “moments;” each room is a seperate entity and a winding pathway connects each room and experience to the next. Nature of window cuts are made depending on the “public/private” program of each room. Final model shown below and study models shown below that.

Below: sketch draft of the final plan.

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Hiker Pavilion:

My first “building”

The form of the building came about from a simple “cut-and-fold” exercise; an 18x18in. sqaure of e-flute was to be cut and manipulated without subtracting or reattaching material. Once complete, we were tasked with then putting this structure into any sort of fictional site and making it habitable. This was my first ever architecture project that resulted in a model of anything that resembled a building. Below are images of the cardboard mockup, the final basswood model, and the plans drawn on brown kraft paper with micron, charcoal, and pastel.