This project asserts the public nature of a region’s infrastructure as a means to reinvent civic spaces, urban forms, and the publics who engage them. As an initial case study, Public Facility Seattle uses municipal waste to produce energy and utilizes that transformation process to offer the city a range of public amenities and experiences.
A waste-to-energy facility (WTE) will collect and process the city’s non-recyclable or compostable waste. Surplus energy generated by the WTE is sold back to the grid in order to finance Public Facility operations, while excess energy is harnessed to heat the Seattle Municipal Hot Springs, a public thermal bath. The forms of the project modify and attenuate the waste transformation process in order to generate pockets of inhabitation.
This project was a collaboration with Jesse LeCavalier.
