2018S_Vertical_Kallipoliti Studio
Second Lives | After Bottles
Faculty: Lydia Kallipoliti, Assistant Professor
Student Team: Adam Beres, Bryce Crawford, Amanda Esso, Reed Freeman, Emily Freeman, Jacob Laird, Deegan Lotz, Christopher Michelangelo, Arun Padykula, Raina Page, Abigail Ray, Daniel Ruan, Emily Sulanowski, Stefanie Warner
Collaborators: Tom Roland (Fabrication and Teaching Assistant), Andreas Theodoridis (CASE PhD student)
Structural Engineer: Mohammed Alnaggar (Civil and Environmental Engineering, RPI)
Consultant: Ashraf Mansour (Civil and Architectural Department, National Research Centre, Cairo, Egypt)
Sponsor: Friendship Products LLC, Timothy Carlson, Managing Partner
Second Lives | After Bottles is an experimental shelter prototype assembled from interlocking plastic bottles that are intended for water supply in the event of natural catastrophe. The installation is the product of an architecture design studio at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, which functioned as a collaborative design-built thinktank and research on disaster relief. The goal has been to use the patented interlocking bottles of Friendship Products to construct and test prototypes for emergency shelters and transitional shelters for displaced populations under conditions of distress.
The design studio brought together architecture and engineering students and professors in a cross-disciplinary platform to work collaboratively and create innovative strategies for material re-use. It has supported the design, fabrication and assembly of a temporary pavilion accommodating variable occupation needs. The aim has been to foster dialogue on topics relating to re-use of industrial products as building materials and on sustainable building construction. During the design studio we have investigated several prototypes and visual analytical drawings variable solutions of construction and deconstruction of small inhabitable spaces using a specific bottle product manufactured by Friendship Products, where components are able to interlock without joints due to their embedded creases. Throughout the design studio, we have tested different scenarios of occupation, configuration, speed of assembly, lighting, ambient temperatures, microclimates and energy efficiency. The prototype shelter in one version of this larger body of work. Rather than focusing on the purely technological aspect of material reuse, this project has addressed the social relations that inform and are informed by the second life of the usage of plastic bottles.
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