It seems to me that the younger generations are the ones that will know how to best put 3D printing to use, simply because they are not as conditioned by the limits of the traditional means of production.
Renjie Huang, an architecture student at the Royal College of Art in London, may give us a glimpse into what these future generations will be able to achieve with Stay Plastic, a fascinating conceptual study for generative, voronoi-shaped recycled-plastic 3D printed housing.
The project combines many of the most sophisticated current advances in terms of technology and general consciousness. Interestingly, the idea is not only rendered through beautiful 3D digital models and images but it is also “prototyped” and made physical, through the use of Renjie’s own Delta FDM 3D printer, as a proof of concept.
It thus begins by speculating how emerging techniques in 3D printing could investigate an architecture completely built from recycled plastic. This would take the use of plastic as a building material to a new scale compared to other projects such as the famous Canal House being 3D printed in Amsterdam. Translating it into reality would require enormous amounts of plastic and the project would be feasible only through the implementation of new and more practical means of recycling the enormous amounts of plastic that contaminate oceans and water ways every single day on Earth (Pacific Garbage Patch included).
According to Renjie’s collected data, we use over 15,000,000 plastic bottles a day in Britain but only 50% are recycled. At the same time oil prices have pushed the price of recycled plastic up by 300% over the last ten years. The need to recycle plastic would thus match the will to envision new means of contraction.
“In the built environment – Renjie writes in his project presentation – large scale additive manufacturing has been largely concerned with replicating conventional architectural models, ignoring the possibilities of the material and process … Stay Plastic proposes a construction process distinct from traditional machining techniques. The design is lead by intricate sequential layering that allows for the most material efficient but spatially generous units.”
The idea is to implement a generative voronoi geometry to create a modular system that can be built through the use of mobile industrial-size 3D printing arms. This scheme would transform the Eastern Riverside Recycling Centre on the banks of the River Thames into a series of mansion blocks, entirely built from plastic. The LEED rating of such a building will have to be evaluated at a later date, but its visual impact is already impressive.
