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Rubbish Architecture: New Breed

Part 1 Project 2012
Samuel Tuck
Arts University Bournemouth | UK
Rubbish Architecture: New Breed

Bournemouth’s coastline is an area brimming with potential as a cultural hub and economic power house. Presently, it plays host to tacky tourism, seedy consumerism and many garish, unimaginative, and often abused structures. Bournemouth’s botanical gardens, the town’s jewel in the crown, are denied the natural union of coastline and townscape, by a sea of lifeless concrete.

This site demands a radical re-visioning; rubbish can become beauty, waste can become growth. This predicament demands a radical method. The proposition Rubbish Architecture is characterised by the notion that nothing is rubbish, and at its core are two concepts: recycling and mutation. The first move was to make a delicate and pristine sketch model of the site in Plaster of Paris. This was then broken and fractured to record the conceptual destruction of the site. These fragments were used to inspire an architectural reaction.

The tower offers a solution; salvages growth from waste, delivers a landscape that motivates and enthuses a community. Formed from the materials of locally demolished buildings, the reformed pods can accommodate endless functions. At the apex of the core sits a rig system that picks up and carries the pods to the exact position. The sorting of materials and manufacturing of the pods is undertaken within the existing IMAX building, which itself has been reused and recycled. Simultaneously, the framework progressively disperses across the landscape below the tower to form new bridges, piers and roofscapes. The more that is recycled, the larger the tower and the landscape that surrounds it can grow.

The materiality of the tower does not adhere to traditional notions of structural beauty, however the concept of beauty can be challenged. In an era that demands sustainable resource as a matter of necessity, the tower is sympathetic to its surroundings because it is formed of the very waste it harvests. This project has conceived a new breed of architecture, a breed that can disperse globally to inspire a new beauty, a newly resourceful world.

Samuel Tuck

Tutor(s)

2012
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