The Spring 2025 atelier “Trash Studio” is a radical design studio that deconstructs Lausanne’s urban landscape, exposing the hidden flows of waste and consumption that underpin capitalist production.
In the realm of architecture, re-use, recycling, upcycling are increasingly addressed, yet often operate in the limited context of materials, structural elements, and furnishings. Though construction is a large contributor to global waste and an important issue to tackle, the question of household waste remains relatively unexplored.
According to averaged statistics, an individual produces around 400 kg of waste per year. This accumulation can lead to a variety of issues, from impacting health and environmental quality, accelerating climate change, and polluting land and water reserves. It will be crucial in the coming years to explore how urban planning and architecture can address this ordinarily invisible underlying flow, inextricable from our urban environment.
What can household waste flows tell us about how we inhabit? How to not only reduce, but reuse what is usually discarded, destroyed, forgotten? How can the architectural project tap into hidden urban flows, and contribute meaningfully to citizen’s futures? By integrating waste with urban communities, commercial interests, and the ecology of the city, there is potential to radically question how our waste can be reintegrated into the cycles that govern urban life, and move toward a more circular city.