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As a temporal embodiment of the Anthropocene, plastic waste is a civic material: its extraction, production, and disposal have global implications on municipal systems regardless of individual engagement. It is, as Roland Barthes observed, “less a thing than the trace of a movement”: condensing the paradoxes of modernity it exacerbates. What would it mean for architectural pedagogy to treat plastic waste as an endemic condition rather than an extrinsic threat? Positioning waste-as-curriculum is a pragmatic engagement of this material landscape: an approach that reframes plastic waste as a new type of raw matter and reorients architects and designers as mediators in distributed networks of people, matter, and industrial processes. Originally developed as *Plastic Reimagined: Material Agency and Circular Design*, a graduate design-research studio and public exhibition at Georgia Tech, the project engaged local waste streams as pedagogical sites. Through a series of comprehensive partnerships—including the Institute’s Office of Sustainability, School of Materials Science and Engineering, campus maker spaces, regional recyclers, and NGOs—students collected, shredded, and remanufactured High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE) and Polylactic Acid (PLA) diverted from institutional and municipal waste ecologies. Three phases structured this pedagogy: first, discursive research reframed plastic as cultural artifact; second, prototyping established workflows of material and methodological experimentation as modes of inquiry; third, the Adirondack chair served as typological scaffold, transforming vernacular furniture into proto-architectural public artifact. The chairs—staged across three public exhibitions—functioned as civic arguments, catalyzing dialogues around ecology, labor, and design ethics. By treating waste as curriculum and exhibition as community encounter, the studio enacted pedagogy as public practice.

Volume Editors
Reed Kroloff & Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez

ISBN
978-1-944214-52-4