periodical for the Building Technologist

United Plastic Nation An Architectural Polemic

FREISCHAERLER arch, Germany-Australia

Looking up a newsfeed in 2017, one might have been thinking to see a perfect recipe for Armageddon: Wars, poverty, environmental destruction.

Three subjects covered the news for months: the refugee crisis with millions of people being displaced from their homes, the pollution with (micro-)plastics of our rivers and oceans, and kind of a financial crisis, at least for some - the publication of the so-called “Panama Papers”, which unveiled the dimensions of illicit money being transferred to offshore tax havens by the world’s richest and greediest.

In that time the United plastic Nation (UPN) concept was initiated by an open competition call. Designers were asked to imagine an island of 1km 2 , not dedicated to any specific use or programme, the island could be anything and be placed anywhere.

Concept Idea

In that context, we felt the answer to this brief couldn’t just be a tropical paradise or a designer’s superstructure fantasy but rather had to employ the tools of architecture to tackle some of our most pressing issues. What if we could take greed, ignorance and violence and create something positive? What if we could turn ocean garbage into the promised land? What if we could turn refugees into citizens? And why can’t we turn tax criminals into social investors?

So we programmed our island as the antipode - an evergrowing structure made out of ocean plastics, floating with the ocean currents and slowly turning circles around the globe, creating a safe haven for the displaced and dispossessed and the squirrelled away fortunes of the world's richest alike. The floating refugee tax haven plastic smart eco future metropolis, so to say.

Figure 2: First Sketch

To Read the complete article and many more checkout our latest issue 73. Futurity.

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