PAavotehkti

“Europe exports six million tonnes of electronic waste to India every year. On arrival, armies of informal labourers comb the mountains of outdated computers, defunct VHS players and faulty MP3 players sorting components and recycling trace nuggets of valuable material, operating outside government regulation, so as not to explicitly contravene international toxic waste export laws.” Architecture Review

An alchemical playground spoons the five toxic mountains of Ahmedabad’s Asnani landfill, converting the unending stream of electronic commodities discarded by the western world into nuggets of pure gold. Fuelled by the productive efforts of this Indian city’s swarm of informal ragpickers, an ensemble of public temples, wells and factories weave themselves into a form to market luxury goods to the burgeoning ranks of India’s super-rich. The project is represented as a series of intricately crafted miniature paintings, reappropriating this traditional Indian form of drawing luxuriously serene Mughal courtly life and idyllic religious scenes so as to allude to the architecture’s overall goal: The elevation of the mundane act of recycling to a level that is both sacred and enjoyable for its participants. Through the ritualisation of this activity, the project’s aspiration is to economically reenfranchise the informal underclass of people so essential to the function of the developing city and in this provide a spatial enclave amid toxic waste

Community Workhouse type

/ Underground Berlin / Lebbeus Woods 

A selection of drawings and models which describe the ‘Tract House’. A project completed in 1987 by Los Angeles based Architect Wes Jones. 

“Machines are about motion, architecture is about place.”

Buckminster Fuller