PAR_Plastic Tower
Architecture Competition
w/ Savoldi
2019
“More than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation; as its everyday name indicates, it is ubiquity made visible.” Roland Barthes
Plastic is one of the greatest material on earth. Since its invention, it has changed our lifestyle and way of thinking design due to its wide range of properties. It is light, comfortable and versatile. Now with the era of FabLab and 3D printer, you can even control the production of your own products. Plastic is an infinite possibilities solution. So why do we have to eliminate it?
Plastic pollution is a fact, but the problem that doesn’t reside in the material itself. It resides in people. The lack of education and understanding the life cycle of this material are the main cause of this issue. Plastic in the street and in the sea are just the result of the ignorance around the use of this material. It is therefore good to educate people through a deep experience where every sense is involved.
Every country in the world consumes and uses plastic in a different way; in these terms, the shape and the size of the project is uncertain and undefined. For this reason, the pavilion put the visitor in the center of the topic by made him responsible of the design result as for the plastic global awareness that implicates a daily and mechanical gesture: throw trash.
The project includes two main components frontally placed: an empty squared monolith with movable panels where people are invited to throw away their plastic waste is placed on the ground, and a second structure that is composed by stackable cubes of recycled plastic, created starting from the objects thrown by people in the first tower, it is floating on the water surface. The amount of recycled cubes is changed cities by cities following the amount of plastic thrown away, as a result, the composition of the tower will always be different in volume and scale.
For accentuating more the topic the recycle cubes produced in one city will be used to create the basement of the structure in the next city for explaining how the plastic problem consequences of one country can affect all the others.
The two towers want to show the life cycle of plastic. One is approachable and interactive, the other one is floating on the water and it is unreachable. These contrast and tension between the dead plastic and the new one want to emphasis how plastic mass is getting day by day bigger by our bad way of using it. The human race is losing control and let the plastic taking day by day more space in our cities. The tower represents an uncomfortable and paradigmatic element that can multiply itself an unlimited number of times until erasing all the free space available.
Plastic is light when you buy it. Plastic is light when you throw it. Plastic is heavy when rise.
