Plastic Spatial Machine

Design, fabrication, and spatial reconfiguration become a strategy to interrogate the relationships between the different material and social processes that gravitate around plastic.

Plastic Spatial Machine (PSM) is an attempt to bring architectural design closer to a material condition which has become fundamental for understanding the conformation of our physical medium.

Since 1976, plastic, in its various shapes and forms, has become the most used material in the world. During 1979 the global economy entered what was officially known as the “plastic age” when its production exceeded the one of steel. Since then, our material reality has gone through an ongoing “plastification”.

More than a project, PSM is a material, spatial and social experiment. Design, fabrication, and spatial reconfiguration is combined as the strategy to interrogate the relationships between the different material and social processes that gravitate around plastic, its opportunities and consequences. It’s a combined effort to link alternative design methodologies with the activation of public spaces through a material reality that, to a great extent, frames our relation with our physical environment, our idea of materiality, ecological future and forms of social interaction.

Design Decode festival worked as a frame for the intervention, with the intense participation of the public, it propelled PSM to become an agent to explore the capacity to configure and articulate our material reality nested in the collective.