Plasma Loop

Year: 2020

Site: Earth

Each year, the Oslo School of Architecture and Design hosts the 120 Hours Competition, wherein students across the world have only 120 hours to develop a response to the brief. The 2020 brief called for a project to promote awareness for plastic pollution in the ocean.

Our project critiques the insinuation that one architecture project can affect real change on a problem as widespread as climate change. "Awareness" solves nothing when limited to a local region. In our presentation, Plasma Loop is being advertised as a recycling center stretching across the world. It alludes to the near future, where inevitably waste, as a last resort, will be commodified to enable corporations to continue to profit. Profit is ultimately the only incentive for sustainability under capitalism. Although this is a bleak presentation of the future, its extreme and ironic nature is meant to make us challenge how we think about sustainability in a market economy.