UNCOMMONS: STATES OF DISASSEMBLY

Lateral Office

Uncommons: State of Disassembly is a speculative installation for the Seoul Biennale in 2017, which designed a series of seven building and landscape types for an e-waste commons that uses key principles of repair, reuse, education and entertainment in three areas, the city center, the peri-urban edge and in urban hinterlands. The exhibition acknowledges the generation of e-waste management with centers across the globe in Agbogbloshie, Ghana, Guiyu, China and Karachi, Pakistan that includes vaults and campuses with architecture and landscapes for e-waste holding, including libraries, workshops, salvage depots, markets and disassembly theaters. In addition to storage space, the project suggests forms of metal recycling and a Salvage Investment Laboratory Operations (S.I.L.O.) Post-extraction land labs test and experiment with post-processing and a scrapyard commons as a collaborative space for experts to hack the e-waste problem in a public display. The project was displayed as a series of models and raised system drawings in the Biennale, where it was one of nine pieces in the recycling category of the Nine Commons exhibition. The project suggests that landscape architects can address design research at a global scale, and envision futures with existing representational tools. By working across scales from Earth to territory to product scale, the exhibition narrative highlighted how displaced sites of electronic consumption and e-waste disposal are, and how majority world nations have become the stewards of e-waste recycling that should be recognized not only as recyclers but also as innovators driving electronic technology. Through this lens, the exhibition also addressed social dynamics, from hacking to forced labor, in e-waste recycling.

2017

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