Week 7 // Story #5 — Story analysis

5. Getting Wasted

If you could use any waste material to construct a building, what would you use, and what would it be?

I’d make it out of stationery waste, I feel like there is a lot of waste in the everyday use of office things. Like all those little paper circles that get hole punched out or when you try to staple a reading but it’s waaaaay too big and the staple just squashes. There’s probably so much paper that gets wasted, stacks of paper are strong too. If you got enough you could probably build a pretty sweet little house out of it. Oh wait, it would get pretty soggy in the rain... it could just be used for interior walls I guess? Actually, what if it was repurposed into furniture or something and put back into the office it came from?

Pallets would make an awesome treehouse! Or the material waste/offcuts and fibres offcuts from fashion garments could be broken down and mixed with stronger materials.

Polystyrene to make napalm?

Off cuts and left over fabric to create a fabric fort or tent structure.

Could you grow a building on waste food?

If it’s actual food - wouldn’t it rot and make one massive compost pile? Plus not to mention the smell if you were inside it!



This week I chose to work on story #5

Team:
– Harry Boyd
– Isaac Laughton
– Sid Bardiya
– Phillip Barham

The main points we pulled out from the story were:

– The double meaning of 'getting wasted' in terms of waste materials and drinking too much
– The fact that the structure has to be constructed from waste material
– The idea of repurposing the waste material and situating it into the context it originally came from


Our idea is to repurpose beer bottles and string them up into screen-like structures. There will be eight screens in total each depicting a letter in order to spell out the word 'TREASURE'. The meaning of using the word 'treasure' is to provoke people to wonder if waste product really needs to be wasted. It also alludes to the saying 'One man's trash is another man's treasure.'

The screens will be placed in a way where they are not all visible at once, creating a sort of loose space between and forcing users to walk through in order to read the whole word. The letters will be depicted through use of brown vs. green bottles. 

As an added level of meaning the bottles themselves will individually be sandblasted with the name of the bar that they came from. This will show how many bottles are wasted from these bars and will put responsibility on them.

The aim of the pavilion is to show that waste products can be utilised to create something new and beautiful — Does waste have to be 'wasted?'