Plastic Reimagined: Material Agency & Circular Design

Plastic is ubiquitous, disposable, and paradoxically permanent. Plastic Reimagined interrogates the material afterlife of post-consumer plastics within architectural discourse—asking not what plastic is, but what it can become.

Developed through ARCH 6050: Architectural Studio Design + Research, a graduate design-research studio in the School of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, this project situates plastic waste—specifically discarded HDPE and PLA—as a site of architectural experimentation. Through a hybrid methodology that combined hands-on analog fabrication with computational workflows, students engaged plastic not merely as waste, but as a transformable and performative medium. Sourced from campus makerspaces, Zero Waste collection streams, and local recycling infrastructure, the material was ground, reprocessed, and reconstituted into new tectonic and spatial expressions.

Each chair on display embodies both object and system, artifact and provocations. The works traverse formal variation, structural logic, and symbolic value—offering diverse methodologies of reuse that challenge conventions of material purity, authorship, and utility.

By coupling computational design with material circularity, Plastic Reimagined contributes to an emergent dialogue at the intersection of sustainability, aesthetics, and pedagogy. This exhibition frames waste as a productive constraint—one that prompts urgent questions about permanence, ethics, and design agency in the Anthropocene.

Acknowledgments

This project was supported in part by an Arts at Tech Catalyst Grant from the Georgia Institute of Technology, with additional support from the College of Design, the School of Architecture, and the Digital Fabrication Lab. We gratefully acknowledge the ongoing partnership of the Zero Waste Department, as well as the support and material contributions from The Invention Studio, The Materials Innovation and Learning Laboratory (MILL), The Hive at Georgia Tech, and our external partner, US Plastics Recovery.

The work was developed through ARCH 6050: Architectural Studio Design + Research, offered by the School of Architecture within the College of Design at Georgia Tech during Spring 2025.

Instructor & Curator: Hyojin Kwon (Assistant Professor, School of Architecture)

Participating students:
Anuj Chhikara, Darby Fly, Sara Hill, Ash King, Brian Lachnicht, Nicholas Liubinskas, Kayla Rinoski, Tianxiang Sheng, Sarah Thrasher, Rachel Witherspoon, Taylor Jensen, Qin Wang, Kai Wang

Photography by Andrew Thomas Lee