Eden Project

Loving the waste

They were given only a huge pile of used tyres, a mountain of old wood – and four days to build a shelter. A tough challenge for architecture students and local volunteers on a constructing with waste workshop at the Eden Project this week… But the result of their four days’ hammering, cutting and bolting is an impressive structure with heavy wooden foundations, a twisted timber frame and a fringed rubber roof.

It sits on the outskirts of Eden as the latest addition to the Building Plot, a patch of land offered to Architecture Sans Frontières-UK (ASF-UK) to test out innovations during their summer schools, which have been run at Eden for the last six years.

A key aim of the ASF-UK workshop was to equip the group with the skills and creativity to innovate with available materials – vital if they are to go on to work abroad in post-disaster reconstruction and international development organisations.

That’s why experts from the Netherlands-based REFUNC joined the group, bringing their experience of and passion for turning unwanted goods into useful objects and innovative pieces of art. They kept the process imaginative, making sure the architects didn’t spend the time doing technical drawings, but got their hands on the materials and let the design “unfold”, as REFUNC’s Jan Korbes put it. Local carpenter Rufus Maurice, meanwhile, helped source vast pieces of usable timber from a Cornish demolition firm DRS.

It’s what ASF-UK’s Andrew Edwards calls “harvesting waste”. He’s drawn up a local ‘harvesting map’, a list of available waste resources from the construction and demolition industry – and the people who can help turn these into valuable products.

He hopes the database of materials, carpenters, electricians, upholsterers and the like could prove useful for both your average man on the street wanting to refit his kitchen as well as the masterminds behind the government’s planned eco-towns. “It makes much more sense than sending waste to China to be ‘recycled’ and then shipped back,” he says.

His ambition is to set up a social enterprise which could source, collect, store and refurbish waste materials, along the same lines as the UK-wide network of ReIY building material reuse centres (short for Reuse It Yourself). The local knowledge and prototype designs from this year’s summer school could provide those vital first steps, he says.

Next week’s summer school is all about constructing more productive urban landscapes. Expect unusual growing containers and ‘edible roofs’ cropping up around Eden…

Follow their progress

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Architecture, Cornwall, Environment, Inspiration, Recycling and waste, Sustainability

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Architecture, Cornwall, Environment, recycling, Sustainability, waste