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E-waste: A Living and Working Exchange Facility

Part 1 Project 2014
James Greig
 University of Plymouth | UK
This project explores new ways of living and working on the vacant edge of the city. An urban density and micro-economy is created at the threshold between the natural and urban landscape. A permanent community works and lives of site but the interface between public and private is blurred, allowing engagement and exchange with the City of Plymouth. Density and programme is derived from the 6 various occupations would inhabit the site.

The current condition is a juxtaposition and tension that exists between the industrial heritage of the disused railway line and the post-industrial electricity pylon, as the sole present elements of the built environment. Electricity is the fuel of the post-industrial city, and with it comes E-waste, the contemporary exhaust.

One of the occupations the materials researcher, becomes essential in developing a programme that responds to this site condition. The project looks at a different way to respond to the increasing volume of this new type of waste, and introducing the idea of ‘exchange’ as opposed to disposal.

E-waste is the by product of the post-industrial landscape, and becomes an entity with which the city begins to have a relationship with. Place, Materiality, Measurability and physical experience are brought to the fore as a more sustainable alternative to the re-distribution of waste to the developing world.

The proposed exchange module creates monument as a place of gathering and relationship. It marks the threshold at the edge of Plymouth in a system of vertical exchange which responds to a movement away from the geography of the waste disposal site, to the architecture of the exchange facility. Gabion boxes create a permeable facade, and are the primary architectural element of the scheme. They house and create a flexible space or melting pot of the different occupations.


Tutor(s)
2014
View looking West across the Plym Estuary. Project sits at the gateway into Plymouth.
Site of potential beauty has been left abandoned and cut off by 5 lanes of fast moving traffic.
Masterplan studies how to create public links into the centre of town using a canal.
Programmatic/spacial study. How can various occupations live and work together as community in a increasingly dense urban condition?
Using diagrams and strategic models to inform placement of scheme within the site.
Living and working combined in a complex and dense spacial arrangement. This smaller scale site was the Testbed for the final proposal.
Occupations exist within a flexible space protected by large permeable Gabion walls.
Global Proposal. Non-toxic economy creates a safe learning environment.
Regional Proposal. Monuments of the post-industrial exist along side monuments of the industrial on the Cornish coast.
Plan view.
Section derived from earlier investigations into spacial arrangement.
Areas of public and private exchange and circulation.
Live unit encased in its own shell on upper layer, ground beneath is public.
Allotments, canal and pontoon drawing in section.
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