By Brian Karn
Imagine working in a grand building that's beautiful, clean, and most importantly, made of garbage. Karn discusses the ecological and aesthetic values of using recycled materials in architecture.
One would be lucky to spot the modest exterior of the IniAni Coffee Shop hidden in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The inside of the shop, however, is an exercise in material inversion. Coming through the door, you will find yourself affronted by a plaster cast of five hundred disposable coffee lids floating above you and lining the wall to your right. There are over fifty variations of the typical lid to be found here. If you would like to sit and enjoy your cup, the designers managed to wedge a small seating area into this tiny store, found directly opposite the conspicuous lid-wall. This small area is both modern and inviting, the walls and ceiling taking on a dark amber hue. Although upon closer inspection, customers notice that the walls and ceiling here are made of corrugated cardboard — 25,000 of them, in fact — backlit by both electric bulbs and candles.
Considered through the lens of sustainability, the initial message here is one of constructing a “new” aesthetic of re-useable materials in a modern culture of glaring wastefulness. How many boxes of coffee were needed to create the cardboard walls, one might wonder. Or who drank all the cups required to amass such large a collection of lids? Most customers would certainly be glad to see these items recycled in the very business that utilizes them, though they might still realize that this apparent recycled nature of the store is actually completely manufactured. The cardboard was new, the plaster lid-wall cast from unused lids. Ironically, we are now led to wonder if this does not perfectly reinforce consumer wastefulness. Arguably the intent was not tongue-in-cheek; this one tiny coffee shop might signify a larger trend in architecture and urbanism, in which sustainability in design is becoming more about interpretive reuse than overt recyclability. This begins to question notions of how consumerism is visually and theoretically reinforced in architecture, planning, and design.
Sustainability obviously does not merely apply to interior design. In fact, sustainability has been a popular subject in design fields since the 1970s. The oil crisis in the United States, which many pointedly associate with the American automobile fascination, has been equally responded to in building design. Buildings account for over 36 percent of total U.S. energy consumption, 65.2 percent of U.S. electricity consumption (Dunne), and 30 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions (U.S.D.O.E.). Knowledge of this consumption led to a huge increase in attempts to make buildings more sustainable and energy efficient.
Our current inherited beliefs about sustainable architecture (and sustainable cars) are tainted by failed attempts in the 1970s to reconcile aesthetics with sustainable design. People often imagine solar panels as huge boxes atop roofs, when in fact the roof itself may consist of solar panels as the primary flat covering. Rainwater retention once took the form of unsightly collection jars; water retention is now focused more on restoring and retaining the natural water table. In the late 1980s, a few notable architects — Frank Gehry, of Bilbao and Disney fame; and Hassan Fathy in Architecture for the Worthy Poor — began to use everyday “ugly” materials like chain-link and mud-brick in new ways, opening the door for aesthetic invention and inversion. Once this aesthetic inventiveness became more commonplace, the theoretical implications became more varied. Why not reuse undesired land in much the same way as undesired materials?
