Recycle, Rebuild, and Reuse - MRF

ARC 207 Architectural Design III / Spring 2024 / Instructor Benedict Clouette

This project explores the considerations of human senses as a design method in a MRF facility. The design aim to create equal floor ground for the factory area, education and office spaces with modular structure system. The modular system are connected together as a whole, allowing people to openly explore the factory and learning about how the materials is being processed. Due to the close proximity of the factory and the climatize area (education and office space), noise and smell is inevitable. To eliminate the factory noise and smell, half of the gable roof are elevated to release the unpleasant smell from the tipping and material process area.

Material - Food Compost

The factory will turn food waste into bio-slurry and edible concrete blocks. Barge will ship all the NYC compost from the yellow compost bin to here. For the edible concrete blocks, MRF will break down the compost through grinding filtered food waste into fine powders and then mixing it will cellulose, then using heat compression machine to turn the liquid into prefabricated concrete that is using on site, and potentially selling to other parts of the cities. The other half of the compost will turn into bio-slurry, that will be transported by truck to the nearby Digester Eggs facility to generate bio-gas for the national grid.