"Tulum Plastic School"

—2019

This proposal invokes an easily recognizable symbol of our global exchanges: the international plastic pallet. Its life cycle spent in transit, the pallet is put to use shipping other plastics around the globe. As a structural object and as a literal representation of waste trade, the project’s use of the pallet avoids common tendencies to aestheticize plastic waste itself. Rather than producing an amalgamated form made from waste or a highly refined construction product made from recycled content, we choose to approximate between these two extremes.

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.