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| Recycle plastic bottle pattern - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash |
This project includes all the things that I love about design and more specifically about the urban landscape and meaningful spatial site interventions. Heath Nash, project coordinator and designer produced and organised this work along with local artisans for Harare International Festival of the Art. HIFA performing arts festival 2011. The South-African designer, reused thousands of recycled plastic bottles and other materials such as plastic buckets and aluminium cans to create a set of canopies for the urban dweller to take to when in need of shade. According to designboom, Nash got the inspiration from simply walking the streets of the Zimbabwean capital whilst observing how people occupied and congregated under the city's tree canopies so to avoid the Southern African mercury.
This observation was translated into a pragmatic and spatial take on the idea of recycling waste materials derived from consumption.
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| Components of an extensive distribution system - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash |
The way in which the canopies are constructed is simply magic. Repetitive pattern is one of the most powerful ways of generating beauty and striking form in my eyes and the combining of cultural and social observation with a commentary of mass-consumption, leads way to a meaningful site intervention.
The project suggests a site intervention that is constructed at a 1:1 scale, utilising local craftsmanship with the organising mind of a designer. The other beauty in this project lie in the system that this 1:1 site intervention actually represents. Where all these bottles, cans and buckets come from remain unrepresented, perhaps it is not doable but I hope that you get the picture. A 1:1 intervention that assembles tens of thousands of small objects that was part of a mass-distribution system going out for consumption to then be returned to another system, that of recycling and end up in this meaningful installation. Simply beauty.
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| re-ordering, re-assembling, re-configuring - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash |
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| process - Image via designboom courtesy of Heath Nash |
