Designing the Open Room :
Fragments, Fantasies , & Spatial Invention at Vizcaya
The installations and exhibition, developed through a foundational design-build course at Miami Dade College, imagined outdoor rooms as spaces for interactive and pedagogical play, expanding upon Vizcaya’s maze-like gardens through a series of interventions. Modular pavilions drew on the site’s shapes and cues, enhancing the villa’s spatial flow and the sequence of experiences. In this way, the project connected past and present through interiors, architecture, and landscape, examining the relationships between domestic space, garden design, and cultural history. Students approached the gardens as a unified field, placing pavilions in both formal and informal areas, such as the Parterre Gardens with their clipped hedges, fountains, and axial pathways. The project unfolded like a puzzle to be explored rather than a problem to be solved—an endless labyrinth of open rooms and scattered fragments across the landscape.
Students
Pavillions & Models: Steven Arencibia, Lyubov Arych, Danelia Diaz Verdia, Adrian Gonzalez, Isabella Gonzalez, Juliana Lopez, Joshua Meza, Jasmine Moraes, Ruth Rebartar, Andrea Saba, Katy Santos, Adriana Solana, Domenika Tomaiconza Soliz, Daniela Suarez, Daniela Villaroel Jimenez, Estefania Villatoro Textiles & Exhibition: Giorgia Crea, Maria Francisco, Patricia Gonzalez, Amanda Hernandez, Katherine Navas, Sophie Naves- Penkwitt, Daniela Osorio, Valeria Panza, Luisana Rios, Lauren Suarez, Annabella Tavares, Elizabeth Brito Audio: Andrew Jinks
MDC x Vizcaya CAP Lab