CYCLO: ARCHITECTURES OF WASTE

Fall 2017, 2018

Instructors: Caroline O’Donnell + Dillon Pranger

Human beings have traditionally built enclosures from close-to-hand materials: tents from animal hides in the desert, log cabins in forests, stone huts in rocky areas, and so on. But the advent of our disposable culture in the mid-twentieth century has brought with it a new set of ‘local’ materials, in the form of waste.

While much emphasis has been placed on recycling (recycling rates in the US are steady at 34%), many materials sent to recycling facilities — especially 3-7 plastics and e-waste — are never recycled, and are instead sent to landfills or incinerators.1 These materials are untapped resources, ripe for use, in need only of appropriate design strategies to harness them.

The CYCLO studio begins by understanding global, continental and national trends in waste: How much waste is produced, where does it go, how is it processed, etc. Students chart flows of materials at a range of scales. Through this process and through visiting local waste and recycling plants, students begin to understand the economy and ecology of the waste world, and to find weak points in which to intervene. As a result of their findings, students chose specific materials and forms (plastic bags, plastic cutlery, glass bottles…). Through understanding the materials’ formal, physical, temporal, economic, ecological properties, students begin to aggregate/reformulate the materials into 1:1 mockups. Finally, students consider the industry/architecture scale consequences of their proposals.