"Pop Rocks is a temporary installation of soft forms that cover an entire city block in the center of downtown Vancouver, Canada. The temporary nature of the civic commission highlighted the necessity for a profoundly efficient use of resources. The project is fabricated entirely from post-consumer and post-industrial waste from the metropolitan Vancouver region, engaging tactically with these materials to produce soft forms that extend the typical range of active and passive social activities typically experienced in cities, fostering unexpected social encounters and new perspectives on the city.The built installation utilizes 500 square meters of Teflon-coated fiberglass that was sewn into discrete shapes by a local sailmaker.
The fabric forms were then filled with 100 cubic meters of reground post-consumer polystyrene packaging at a local manufacturing facility. The development of Pop Rocks employed an iterative design, modeling, and prototyping process. The final forms were informed by the material logic dictated by using stiff fabric to contain lightweight loose granular aggregates. This responsive process-based design methodology and its results are indicative of design operations that are increasingly relevant in the context of decreasing resources.Recycled architectures such as Pop Rocks mark a departure from traditional top- down form-heavy design methods towards a contingent, emergent, and tactical design ethos.
This might be described as a new form of pragmatism that is not only ethically enticing but also promises new aesthetic, formal, social, and political frontiers. Designing in accordance with the soft suppleness of waste produced an environment that challenges the dominance of the hardness in cities and its associated behavioral norms."