doing double duty 1 Recycling and disassembly processes that break products down into raw materials or constituent parts pose a particular challenge to designers in that they typically obscure linkages between waste and reuse, making it very difficult for consumers to see and understand lifecycles of production, consumption, waste and reuse — think of those tote bags announcing in bold typeface that they ‘used to be a plastic bag’. Each of the projects discussed so far engage this challenge in different ways through design. In contrast, the waste-stream piggybackings we now turn to intervene in advance of disassembly to capture not only the raw materials but also the embodied energy and social histories of designed artifacts. These next projects call our attention to instances of architectural reuse by creating legible narratives around these efforts and by challenging architects to anticipate and design for a project’s afterlife at the very outset of design—effectively doing double duty as two projects in succession.
Holding Pattern , Interboro’s 2011 project for the MoMA P.S.1 Young Architects Program, is notable for the way it enlarged the ambitions and possibilities of an ephemeral urban construction. More than merely fulfilling MoMA’s project brief of providing a dynamic stage for a summer festival, Interboro designed their installation with the project’s afterlife in mind. The needs of MoMA patrons were overlapped with the needs of a diverse array of neighbourhood organisations by designing for both groups simultaneously (figure 4) . At the end of the installation’s time at P.S.1, the seventy-nine objects that Interboro designed and the eighty-four trees they planted were all given new homes among fifty local community organisations for long-term use and enjoyment. Through a process of extensive community outreach and inventive design work, Interboro leveraged the commission to realise not one but two projects: the first for P.S.1, and the second for the local community. Every element of the installation was uniquely charged and enriched by the designers’ ambition to leverage the project budget to serve not just a single institutional client for one summer, but a whole community of clients over the longer term.
figure 4: Interboro, Holding Pattern . Event installation with an afterlife of community service. Drawing by Brian Holland and Brenden Wohltjen.
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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