The intervention aims to reconnect and create accessibility from one side to the other of the urban barrier that is the Makercity building, creating more interaction with the exterior, both visually and physically. At the same time, the designed spaces have to accommodate heavy industrial machines, which require a lot of space vertically and horizontally, and produce a lot of heat.
The main problem tackled in the project is the Korea glass recycling issue: only a few local bottles are really reused/recycled, the rest of them (foreign bottles, or really colorful bottles) are actually landfilled. Heavy machinery is used to transform these bottles into two construction materials: tiles and expanded beads. These processes require a lot of space and produce a lot of heat, so energy plays an important role in the multiple processes. The project seeks to collect and reuse this heat at the same time as material flows cross and work with energy flows. There’s a vertical connection linking all the floors together, which is the heart of the heat system by retaining and conducting the heat produced by the machines to warm up the housing floors in winter or to be evacuated throughout the roof in summer.
The urban flows are really linked to the intervention since a new road for trucks and new pedestrian streets going across the building are created. Such paths strive for having more people walking around and through the existing building, but they are also a way to put people in contact with the glass industry. Both the showcasing of materials and products, and the offering of workshops and ateliers to work with the different materials are a complementary way to interest people on the potential of glass, which is surely quite broad and rich to end up landfilled.