Never was Trash so Valuable: Industries, Architectures and Landscapes of Waste

Abstract

Against the backdrop of an unsolvable environmental crisis and the questioning of the current industrial model, this article reviews some architectural implications of waste management. Its habitual concealment raises questions about the places where it is relocated and the way in which solid matter is treated industrially, which, after being extracted, transformed and re-territorialized in the machines that sustain urban civilization, is digested in the cities. The research focuses, firstly, on the consequences of the excess of production that has grown obsessively and addictively over two centuries of accelerated technological development. Then, linked to the Spanish economic and regulatory framework of recent decades, examples of (post-)industrial sites and landscapes designed to manage, reinsert and displace industrial waste are examined. The case studies chosen allow us to weave together contemporary debates and future challenges, both in conversation with other disciplines and in relation to social controversies, political agendas and ecological conflicts that concern those entropy factories often neglected by architecture. The objective is to elucidate how, from a better understanding of the material reality that we conceive as waste, we can re-evaluate established concepts of waste and thus refocus our everyday practices and design experiences. © 2024 Universidad de Sevilla. All rights reserved.