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Friday, March 5, 2010

Another Modern Infill Idea for St. Louis

Take a look at what Affresol, a modular house construction company in the United Kingdom, has developed: a house made of 100% recycled plastics.

Above: Ian McPherson, managing director of Affresol, standing next to the raw material and the end product. Photo credit--Swansea Bay

They're cheap. They reuse waste. And I like the colonial-stylings of this example. As sort of a follow-up to the previous post, I'd love to see St. Louis start thinking with this bold, experimental, creative mindset when approaching infill.

Make sure to click the link to the BBC story to watch the video and get a tour of the inside--which includes panels made of smashed TVs. Awesome!

3 comments:

john w. said...

Love it. Awesome. Truly adaptive reuse of material resource. Prefab potential of economy of scale that could transform whole blocks and neighborhoods back into habitable enclaves not long after tragic displacements. Long live prefab and those who continue to believe in its industrial capacity to be ultimately humane.

samizdat said...

Well, first off, it's good that this product has the potential to take millions of pounds of materiel out of the waste stream. Good basic design, and the applications for emergency housing are a welcome innovation, though I wonder at the cost. Perhaps they will actually have designs on this application in future. However, since there are a number of known toxins (vinyl chloride, BPA and other phenols, bromides from the fire retardents in the computer and TV, etc., products) present in the various plastics utilised here, I would worry about the levels of off-gassing present in this structure. A "cold" process is mentioned, but few details are provided. More information is needed, Beeb.

Alan said...

i had to forward the people at GNO inc. about this when i read the BBC story the other day. sounds just amazing all around if it lives up to the talk

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