230 entrants for the plastic school design competition

Archstorming, an architectural platform that organizes international competitions, has released the results for the Tulum Plastic School contest. In fact, participants were challenged to design a school made of recycled plastic, tackling the current issue of pollution in Mexico.

The competition gathered 230 proposals from more than 50 nationalities, and the challenge consisted of imagining a school for the NGOs MOM I’M FINE Project and Los Amigos de la Esquina in Tulum, Mexico, using recycled plastic as a main material of construction, new to the architectural world. Through this problematic, participants showcased innovations in design and architecture, creating inventive projects in order to raise awareness. Alternative Techniques included reusing plastic bottles, fruit boxes or plastic pallets.

The first prize was awarded to Daniel Garcia and William Smith from Harvard University, USA. Whereas the second prize was granted for David Nee Zhi Kang from Sarawak, Malaysia and third position to a team from Argentina, including Iván Elías Barczuk, Matías Raúl Falero, Agustín Flamig, Adrián Eduardo Mendez.

HERE ARE THE WINNERS

Read on to discover the full list of finals and notes from their statements.

1^st Place – Daniel Garcia, William Smith – San Francisco, Ca, USA

Set as the underlying structural order of the building, the quotidian pallet is elevated to an architectonic level, its engineered porosity filtering light into the school’s lofted interior. The pallet is threaded through its forklift channels onto a repeating bay system and grouped to form two gabled structures that pivot around a pair of courtyards: one can be seen as an extension of the classroom, the other is offered to the community. […] Conversely, the structure becomes a beacon for the community at night. The form seeks to promote an architecture of multiplicities: domestic, industrial, traditional, and contemporary.

2^nd Place – David Nee Zhi Kang – Sarawak, Malaysia

The concept of the Tulum Plastic School focuses on the children‐centered design and the wellness of the community. […] The construction will not use any processed recycled plastic material but focusing on the simple solutions using common plastic waste such as bottle without the need of heavy machine or professional. So that it can be practiced easily and widely by people of Tulum in the interest of reducing plastic wastage.

3^rd.  Place – Iván Elías Barczuk, Matías Raúl Falero, Agustín Flamig, Adrián Eduardo Mendez – Posadas, Argentina

The designed project and its implementation are born from the recognition of the existing situation and analyzes as a starting point the ways of living in the region, trying through its construction to complete volumetrically the existing corner and liberate the general floor of the same, providing almost total continuity of public space within the intervention. […] At the same time, the whole generation of the work is born from four factors of primordial importance: the generation of a basic module of design, the flexibility of space and uses, and the social and cultural integration of the community during the construction process of the building and the material recycling.

Source: ArchDaily