Turning waste into architecture

Parasitic Prototype 7
 
By: Sean Hanmer – Canterbury School of Architecture
Kent, United Kingdom

Parasitic Prototype 7 is about the reusing and the cannibalisation of an existing structure, in this situation – the Greenwich Power Station. Using a power station, itself a symbol of profligate use of energy seemed very apt for a project, which stimulates a process of recycling (plastic) waste into architecture. Capitalist demands for urban growth exist but this scheme re-uses of a brownfield site, reduces urban sprawl into the suburban greenbelts. It moves away from this 1 bottle = 1 bottle philosophy and mediating a change in society, towards a more sustainable environment and a more dynamic society. Promoting the recycling of material waste into a new system, which has the capacity to reprocess waste into a product that can perform a superior – longer life-span function, keeps plastic waste away from our landfills and oceans.

The proposed prototype has the ability to print itself using 3D printing technology, taking in all the plastic wastes that were previously deemed too economically unviable for recycling and reprocessing them for fused deposition modelling, printing the external skin and internal components of the skyscraper. The rate at which the prototype reaches its predefined resolution is dependant on the amount of recycled material being pumped into the mechanism and the economic demand for growth.  As a result of this, the intervention has no period of completion date, resulting in an ‘architecture in flux’. Continuous changes in programme will influence the development of construction. Therefore the skyscraper has been designed with adaptability in mind, allowing for the continuous reprinting of its internal floor plans and also allowing for different programmes to occupy the prototype. This is key to the survival of the intervention, supporting economic development through progression, inflation and recession.

Source: http://www.gurroo.com/designart/innovative-minds-architectural-design-competition/