Portfolio 2026

EMANUELE DI PAOLA

Architecture, SCI-Arc BArch 2027

Los Angeles, CA

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2024 to 2026
01

"Yovie" Cultural Center

Vienna, Austria, 2025

A performance hall that breaks its container, making structure and movement part of the show. A cultural center in the heart of Vienna, designed to host performance, exhibition, and communal gathering, and to hold its ground on the Ringstrasse through layered transparency and circulation.

Cultural Performance Hall
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02

Spiral Staircase

Los Angeles, CA, 2025

A study in structure and flow. A diagonally cut eggcrate system creates this sculptural staircase, revealing structure through sectional geometry. Explores the relationship between load transfer and spatial rhythm through a continuous folded steel spine and suspended acrylic treads.

Fabrication Structure
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03

SCI-Arc Extension

Los Angeles, CA, 2024

A proposal for a SCI-Arc extension built from the program assemblies the school already has. It is not an addition but a duplication: the spaces that actually work were identified and reproduced as a mirrored twin, joined to the original bar through Keck Hall.

Institutional Program Parametric
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04

Lymphtonic

Downtown Los Angeles, 2024

A speculative tower where an algae façade feeds on the building’s own exhaust. Fitness floors and a data center make similar demands: heat rejection, controlled air, continuous circulation. So the section stacks them in one structural frame instead of separating them. The pool becomes the data hall’s ceiling.

Speculative Mixed-Use Unreal Engine
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05

Future Ruins

São Paulo, 2024

A short film depicting a hypothetical post-apocalyptic environment focused on the MASP museum in São Paulo. The ruin is not accidental but designed: every element of decay was choreographed to reveal how the building would fail. The structural skeleton remains partially intact, reclaimed by overgrowth.

Film Visualization
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06

Panel Mirror

Los Angeles, CA, 2025

A kinetic self-portrait machine. A camera reads the viewer’s face in real time, collapses it to an 8 × 8 binary grid, and hands the 64 values to 64 hand-wired stepper panels. At that resolution you are not recognizable, only present. The wall reports movement, not likeness.

Kinetic Physical Computing Arduino
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07

Civic Quarry

Quito, Ecuador, 2026

A Natural History Museum extracted from the density of the city itself. Rather than adding to the urban mass, the project removes, carves, and reveals, treating the existing city block as raw material and civic program as the exposed seam within. Competition proposal, 4B studio.

Museum Competition
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08

The Archive

Interactive Web Experience, 2026

The last paper archive, explored in first person in the browser. After the takeover, one candlelit room of paper survives: sixteen records on theory, simulation, and the archive itself, attended by the Keeper. A museum that exists only online, blurring curation, atmosphere, and game space.

Web App Three.js Interactive
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09

The Green Labs

SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, 2025

A school expansion designed to run on its own section. One shaft cut through the middle of the plan narrows until air accelerates through it, ventilating every floor without a fan, and the same geometry funnels daylight into a core no window reaches. Group project for Environmental Systems II, targeting LEED Platinum.

Sustainability Passive Systems LEED
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SCI-Arc · Los Angeles · Est. 2022

I'm an architecture student at SCI-Arc, Los Angeles, working toward a BArch (2022-2027). My projects move across cultural centers, institutional buildings, speculative structures, and short films, always looking at how structure, movement, and space relate to each other.

I work across computational design, physical model-making, and digital fabrication, trying to keep the technical and the conceptual in conversation.

Experience

  • Summer Intern 2026 Tighe Architecture
  • SCI-Arc Planet City Exhibition 2026 Liam Young
  • Teaching Assistant, Work-Study Studio 2026 Fall SCI-Arc
  • Summer Intern 2025 ROTO Architects
  • Spring Show Participant 2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 2025 SCI-Arc
  • Class Representative, SCI-Arc STUN 2023 - Present

Education

  • BArch 2022-2027 SCI-Arc, Los Angeles
  • Business & Management 2021-2022 American University of Rome

Awards

  • SCI-Arc Gala / Thomas Heatherwick Award 2025 Selected Model
  • SCI-Arc Continuing Student Scholarship 2024-2026
  • ROTO-Architects Scholarship 2025

Tools

Modeling & Drawing
Rhino Revit AutoCAD Blender ZBrush
Computation
Grasshopper Houdini TouchDesigner
Image & Film
Unreal Engine V-Ray Adobe Suite
Fabrication
Arduino 3D Printing

Posted.

Where the work has shown up outside this site. Two architecture accounts that picked up projects, and the school's own channels.

Get in
touch.

Based in Los Angeles, finishing a BArch at SCI-Arc in 2027. Email is the fastest way to reach me for studio work, internships, or questions about any of the projects above.