Given the scale of the installation at Designuru 3.0 and the materials that went into its making, the public were drawn to it, engaging with it visually, walking around it curiously. The entire structure was erected with strips of plywood that were glued together along with infill plywood panels of standard sizes. The elements that further went into decorating the structure were all waste generated by city living. The design aimed to communicate this message and the idea of sustainability to the public, Architect Leena Kumar said.
According to her, every man-made item should live its full cycle before it self-destructs to become part of the earth again. To sustain is to use every item to its full life and to waste is to discard it before this lifetime, she states. “When you re-use, you are being creative and giving life to the discarded items until there is no energy left in it and on this depends our future as we have enough for use but not enough for waste”, she points out.
Over the seven-day festival, the structure served not only as a symbol of creative reuse of waste but also as an interactive place for hosting student workshops, presentations as well as simply an area to sit back and ‘Pause’. “The end objective of erecting the structure, besides promoting the concept of sustainability, was also to explore coming up with such public installations across the city built from waste where they would serve as interactive spaces, as avenues where one can merely sit back, pause and reflect on life and the many things that flow within it”, sums up Kumar.
At the end of the festival, the structure was dismantled, only to find its way to yet another conceptualisation and reuse.
R.G.