ABOUT ME
giancarlo.joyner@gmail.com
@giankiboy
Design, at its best, is an act of empathy, a way of wholeheartedly acknowledging the communities, cultures, and histories that give a place its soul. As a designer, I am driven by the belief that architecture is one of humanity's most enduring forms of storytelling, capable of carrying culture forward and honoring identity, ultimately shaping how people experience a sense of community and belonging. These convictions sit at the heart of how I see the world.
With a foundation in literature, art, and human geography, my design practice is rooted in deep analytical research, clear communication, and a relentless curiosity about how communities relate to the spaces they inhabit. My work strives to untangle complex social, economic, and environmental challenges, and to leave behind spaces that are visually and functionally sound, but above all, profoundly felt and meaningful to the people they serve.
MY EDUCATION
University of Miami
Bachelor of Architecture, Minor in Sustainable Development & Geography
2026
University of Miami School of Architecture
Rome Program
Spring 2025
Bishop O’Dowd High School
2021
MY EXPERIENCE
Architectural Design Intern
H-Level Architecture
2026
Creative Studio Consultant & Assistant
University of Miami Libraries
2024–2025
Architectural Intern
Stofft Cooney Architects
2023-2024
MY SKILLS + EXPERTISE
AutoCAD
Rhinoceros 3D
Grasshopper
Revit
ArchiCAD
Adobe Photoshop
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe InDesign
Lumion
Enscape
ArcGIS
Ultimaker Cura
Bambu Studio
Gendo AI
Microsoft Office
Google Suite
Lightroom
Python
Figma
Claude
Perplexity
LANGUAGES I KNOW
*each “+” denotes additional proficiency level
English
+++++
Italian
+++++
Spanish
+++
HONORS & AWARDS
University of Miami School of Architecture
Undergraduate Design Studio Award Nominee
2024
University of Miami
Provost’s Honor Roll
2022, 2023, 2024, 2025
University of Miami
Dean’s List
2021, 2022
COMITES
Maria Manetti Shrem Award
2021
University of Miami
‘Canes Achievement Award
2021
College Board
AP Scholar with Honor
2021
MY CERTIFICATIONS
LEED Green Associate
USGBC(US Green Building Council)
In Progress...
Learning Revit 2026 by Paul F. Aubin
LinkedIn Learning
2026
Coral Gables, FL, USA, 2022
Conceived as an "Eco Parametric Structure", MNGRV takes the form of floating urban furniture sited on the University of Miami's Lake Osceola. It participates as a continuation of the campus's ongoing production of outdoor civic space, guided by the principle that experiential space should remain accessible to all.
The project's formal logic is based in the ecology of the South Florida mangrove, a keystone species whose submerged root systems shelter a dense web of dependent organisms. Radiating downward from a central trunk into a complex, dome-like canopy, the mangrove's root architecture becomes the generative geometry of the pavilion, translated through a parametric Grasshopper workflow. This computational process operationalizes a biomimetic design methodology across three sequential phases: biological, geometric, and technical — folding ecological language directly into architectural form.
Programmatically, the pavilion operates as a gathering point along the lake's edge for the university community, its interior calibrated as an immersive acoustic environment: hidden speakers embedded within tree-planter elements emit ambient soundscapes of native South Florida flora and fauna. The result is an interactive, sensorial structure engineered to support mental wellbeing. MNGRV thus becomes a piece of ecological infrastructure masquerading as urban furniture, embedded within the everyday rhythms of campus life.
Collaborators: Giancarlo Joyner & Matthew Jarmon
Studio: ARC213
Professor: Tomas Tapias
Third-year Fall Semester, 2022
University of Miami School of Architecture
Venice, IT, 2023
Following a studio-wide masterplan proposal for Venice's Isola di Sant'Elena, the project advances a contemporary exhibition center through the adaptive reuse of a derelict factory complex sited within the island's industrial quarter, adjacent to an active shipyard. The intervention is conceived as a catalyst for reimagining the neighborhood's northern edge as an emerging cultural district — one organized around design and the visual arts, positioned to draw visitors into a part of the city historically defined by industrial production rather than public life.
Fabbrica delle Belle Arti tactically pursues this ambition by retaining the site's two primary warehouse volumes while demolishing the ground-floor structure that once connected them, opening a void between the buildings that frames views toward the canal beyond. This incision generates a central courtyard that choreographs movement through the site toward the water's edge, embedding the Venetian landscape as an active, sensorial component of the exhibition experience rather than a passive backdrop. The result is a deliberate architectural dialogue: curated, controlled interior gallery space set against the comparatively "wild," unmediated character of the exterior landscape.
Atop the retained warehouses, the reflective geometric addition housing gallery spaces and offices, maintains a quiet deference to its surroundings. The addition’s surface mirrors the adjacent landscape and historic Venetian fabric so closely that the intervention nearly dissolves into its context, becoming a contemporary insertion content to hide in plain sight.
Collaborators: Giancarlo Joyner & Fabio Cesaroni
Studio: ARC305
Professor: Pedro Munarriz
Third-year Fall Semester, 2023
University of Miami School of Architecture
North Beach, FL, USA, 2024
ONDA Youth Center reimagines civic infrastructure for Miami Beach's rapidly densifying northern corridor, responding to a demographic shift that has outpaced the area's existing public realm.
Conceived as a program-driven massing exercise, the scheme organizes gymnastics facilities and ancillary indoor sports programming into a stacked hierarchy of geometric volumes, their cantilevered, stair-stepped profile drawing on the rational tectonic language of Miami's art-deco lineage while reasserting a civic monumentality often absent from contemporary recreational typologies.
This rigid orthogonal datum is deliberately counterpointed by an undulating envelope of perforated, curved aluminum screening — a performative rainscreen that filters solar gain while choreographing a rippling, wave-like reading of the façade, an oblique gesture toward the Atlantic coastline just beyond. At grade, the project extends its civic ambition by integrating and expanding the site's existing skate park, stitching informal youth culture into the building's public frontage.
Sited planning was governed by an ecological constraint as much as a formal one: a mature canopy tree occupying the geometric center of the site was preserved in situ, with the architecture literally parting around it — the massing cradling the tree as both structural void and symbolic anchor, employing an existing natural asset within the building's spatial and experiential logic.
Collaborators: Giancarlo Joyner & Matthew Jarmon
Studio: ARC306
Professor: Steven Fett
Third-year Spring Semester, 2024
University of Miami School of Architecture
Haulover Beach, FL, USA, 2024
Atmospheric data is foundational to storm forecasting and the prediction of meteorological events, and for centuries its collection has demanded that humans risk their lives at the front lines of extreme weather. The past two decades of rapid drone development, however, have opened new and increasingly autonomous methods for completing tasks once reserved for aircraft, helicopters, weather balloons, and satellites.
Building on drone systems developed and tested by NOAA and the US government to rapidly assess and predict storms and natural disasters, A.D.L.T.S. proposes the infrastructure such systems currently lack: a network of coastal towers engineered to autonomously deploy, recover, and recharge diverse fleets of weather drones across a range of critical missions.
More than a singular tower typology, the proposal constitutes an infrastructural system, capable of housing, maintaining, and coordinating the launch and control of multiple drone fleets so they can be rapidly activated to track storm systems, penetrate hurricanes, locate victims, and deliver civilian aid in the aftermath of flooding and severe weather. Given that the structure must remain fully operational during and after the storm events it is designed to survey, durability and climatic resilience become primary design drivers. Accordingly, the tower's structural system draws direct inspiration from maritime architecture, its form developed to deliberately withstand and shed both aerodynamic and hydrodynamic forces.
*Nominated for Undergraduate Design Studio Project of the Year Award by University of Miami School of Architecture, 2024
Collaborators: Giancarlo Joyner & Will Hammer
Studio: ARC407
Professor: Lily Wong
Fourth-year Fall Semester, 2024
University of Miami School of Architecture
Rome, IT, 2025
Alma Femina begins from the quiet and urgent premise that home, for many women, is not a given. It is a co-housing project for three of Italy's most structurally vulnerable populations: survivors of domestic violence, single mothers holding households together alone, and elderly women aging in isolation. The project responds directly to ISTAT data on Italy's ongoing femicide crisis and rising rates of elderly solitude, statistics that conceal a widespread, often invisible absence of safety and belonging. Alma Femina proposes architecture as a response: a mechanism of protection, transition, and long-term community for women navigating precarity at different life stages. Each population is assigned a distinct residential typology suited to its needs, from secure, transitional units for survivors to more integrated, communal arrangements for elderly residents, while shared spaces throughout the complex foster cross-generational solidarity among the three groups.
The site itself carries a unique and layered history. Its three constituent buildings date to 1906, originally constructed as the Società Automobili di Roma, an automobile manufacturing plant built alongside an adjoining warehouse complex. The site was later repurposed as the Reale Fabbrica delle Armi, a weapons factory and barracks serving Italy's World War I effort: its central volume housing administrative offices, flanked by twin structures that quartered factory workers. This lineage, bound up with militarism and industrial production, imbues the existing fabric with a latent architectural language of defense and fortitude, a motif the project deliberately reauthors: from a site once organized around the machinery of war and labor, toward one organized around protection, care, and communal resilience.
The schematic strategy hinges on a process of subtractive intervention: hollowing out the existing volumes and dynamically reinserting rectangular masses within them to proliferate courtyard conditions throughout the block, a device long employed in the dense urban palazzina to admit daylight despite tight lot lines and party-wall proximity. In parallel, the project abandons the buildings' original floor-to-floor organization in section and elevation entirely, granting license to carve fenestration freely through the existing envelope, evoking the permeated, voided condition of Roman ruins.
This formal language draws direct lineage from Luigi Moretti's Casa Girasole, a canonical Roman palazzina whose rendering technique closely emulates an archaeological artifact dating to Roman antiquity. Alma Femina inherits this sensibility, reframing the site's fortified industrial past as a contemporary ruin: one that reclaims the power once embedded in its militaristic and industrial motifs for the solidarity of the collective domestic life it now protects.
Collaborators: Giancarlo Joyner & Fabio Cesaroni
Studio: ARC408
Professor: Luca Galofaro & Stefania Manna
Fourth-year Spring Semester, 2025
University of Miami School of Architecture
Miami, FL, USA, 2026
Miami's urban core ranks among the most park-deficient in the United States — a condition created by a critically low ratio of green space per capita, downtown tree canopy coverage languishing at just 5%, and a public realm dominated by heat-absorptive hardscape that amplifies the urban heat island effect within an already subtropical climate. As residential and commercial density continues to intensify, the resulting deficit of accessible nature, air quality, and thermal relief constitutes a measurable public health condition for those who live and work within it.
Compounding this ecological deficit is a parallel crisis of food access: numerous neighborhoods, including downtown itself, remain without adequate infrastructure for fresh, healthy food. Pulmón operates as a direct architectural response to both conditions simultaneously — proposing a vertical urban park that mixes productive ecology, farm-to-table food systems, as well as civic life within a single high-rise structure at the city's core.
The proposal embeds a vertical farming system directly into the tower's floorplates and façade, transforming structure into productive agricultural surface. This integrated cultivation supplies the building's food and beverage program with hyper-local produce, extending access to fresh, locally grown food to residents, workers, and visitors alike, all while eliminating the environmental overhead of long-haul supply chains.
Beyond their agricultural function, the tower's planted surfaces perform a more subtle ecological labor: capturing particulate matter, generating oxygen, attenuating traffic and urban noise, buffering wind loads, and casting shade that meaningfully reduces ambient heat exposure. Positioned against a global backdrop of densifying cities, mounting climate vulnerability, and shrinking urban green space, Pulmón poses a deceptively simple provocation: what if the city itself could be the park?
Collaborators: Giancarlo Joyner
Studio: ARC510
Professor: Juan Yactayo
Fifth-year Spring Semester, 2026
University of Miami School of Architecture