Undergrad Virtually Builds Mall, Drawings Fans Globally to ‘Campus’
By Karen Shih ’09
Screenshot courtesy of
Giuseppe LoPiccolo
It’s McKeldin Mall—just blockier.
With painstaking detail, Giuseppe LoPiccolo ’25 is recreating the UMD central quad’s stately red-brick buildings, sparkling ODK Fountain and zigzagging pathways in the bestselling video game Minecraft.
“You want to make it look realistic, but it’s hard to find the right materials and scale the features,” says the government and politics major. “There’s a ton of hurdles.”
To overcome them, he’s carefully studied publicly available blueprints, used his skills as The Diamondback’s photo editor to take pictures and videos from every angle, and even relied on his girlfriend’s expertise as a plant science and landscape architecture major to help him figure out terrain.
A Minecraft aficionado since he was 9, LoPiccolo frequently streams his sessions on Twitch to followers from as far as Greenland and the United Kingdom. Once he finishes, he plans to distribute his build so others, like Maryland Images tour guides and prospective students, can explore what he’s created.
