[4] Daniels came to find her voice as a black woman, the figure she often found “objectified or negated in the approach to architecture.”[5] The highlights of her earlier works and personal research focus on the critiques on the techniques of power – gender, sexuality and race – and how these social structures shape the built environment in the form of architecture.
[citation needed] While at the Whitney Independent Study Program, Daniels developed her practice that responds to issues of gender, race and other forms of subjugation in the built environment through research and design.
[9][10][11] In 1996, Daniels devised a standing urinal for women first installed in a guestroom of New York City’s Gramercy Park Hotel, to challenge architecture, at the scale of space and object, to confront gender and sexuality as a biased technology in building and clothing codes.
The straddle-style installation, FEMMEpissoire, consists of pipes for flush, a pair of rubber pants, a dryer addressing the commodification of female hygiene, and a mounted mirror for self-reflection of users’ bodies and identities.
[citation needed] In her endeavors, Daniel confronted architecture to the heaviness of black history in scales ranging from territorial mapping to small-scale installations to publication and writings.