Nothing Unwanted: Prototyping Matter out of Place

Abstract

What we discard never truly disappears.

Accompanying the societal shift from post-war scarcity to a consumerist culture, the contemporary building industry relies on abundant virgin materials, machinery, and a global transportation network. Immersed in this culture of convenience, architecture has limited agency to engage responsibly and intimately with reclaimed materials. The design of waste, inevitably, often symbolizes the separation between society and its waste, marked by an intention to remove, re-form, and re-standardize. Zero-waste systems and circular economy often inadvertently create hidden wastes, labor, and carbon footprints, leading to an uneven distribution of environmental harms.

The thesis explores the unique materiality of municipal waste, linking human living with their unwanted with an architectural prototype. The new "unwanted" architecture integrates local waste into an adaptive inventory, avoiding over-precision, over-purification, and over-modularization. Based on the characteristics of US municipal waste, local-sourced garbage, including e-waste, plastics, wood, paper, metal, dust, and food waste, is studied, calibrated, and assembled to create building components and rooms. The bottom-up approach offers a way to compute heterogeneous materials with digital methods and low-tech on-site operations to minimize environmental impact. The richness of space blurs the boundaries between domesticity and abjection and between the sublime and the disgusting.

The prototypes aim to rebuild both the Functional and Emotional Unwanted and re-imagine a scalable and operable building system. The design contrasts the previously visible waste in architectural design with today's invisible waste stream due to sophisticated waste management. It demonstrates an intimate approach to the gigantic amount of urban waste, emphasizing its cultural, personal, and collective dimensions.