ABSTRACT
In systematic studies of the sustainability of urban environments, waste is one of the key flows to be analyzed (Yencken, 2000). However, as a program for urban design, the infrastructure and rituals surrounding garbage collection and disposal are rarely considered beyond sidewalk trash-can design. Three precedents of note inform this work, none specifically by architects. There are the transitory gardens and shelters built on Manhattan from reclaimed garbage by the city’s homeless and photographically recorded by landscape architects Balmori and Morton (1993); architectural installation artist Tadashi Kawamata’s vast and temporary splint built from reclaimed building waste around the quarantine hospital on New York City’s Roosevelt Island, not exactly portable, but not permanent either (Gould, 1993); performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles’ work as an unpaid artist in residence at the New York City Department of Sanitation, including the Social Mirror from 1983, a garbage collection truck clad in mirror, and a performance piece titled Touch Sanitation which involved a ritual of handshaking with 8,500 garbage collectors over a period of eleven months in the late 1970s (Gablik, 1991). All of these projects engage creatively with the spatial exercise of transportation and use garbage as both the object and primary material of their work.
