Big Blue Bench
University of Kentucky
College of Design
School of Architecture
ARC 599/499: Spring 2022 Design Elective
Fabricating Play
The Big Blue Bench is a furniture piece and public art installation that serves as prototype to demonstrate the reuse of plastic waste as building material. The product is the result of research funded by the 2021 Sustainability Challenge Grant Program from the University of Kentucky to generate new uses for the abundance of discarded plastic produced by the university healthcare facilities and serve as a model for designing and building with sustainability in mind.
This design proposal was developed over the course of the Spring 2022 semester in a design build elective, Fabricating Play, offered in the College of Design by Associate Professor of Architecture, Jason Scroggin. The class explores the use of the systematic processes of digital design and fabrication directed towards the development of large-scale interactive objects. These constructed objects consider the relationship to human scale and proportion, materiality, and method of fabrication and assembly.
The design proposal selected by the class featured a large bench that provided a communal “island” for working and relaxing to be placed anywhere on campus. It is a set of horizontal shifting and undulating plates allowing multiple zones of varying sizes for sitting and holding a variety of items from laptops to coffee cups.
The final fabrication is entitled Big Blue Bench. It demonstrates the reuse of the discarded material on its topmost surfaces operating as a functional bench and table. The discarded surgical blue wrap reused for this project is a made with polypropylene and is recyclable due to its thermoplastic nature and is one of the safest plastics to melt. The top layers of the Big Blue Bench are comprised of 106 custom cut tiles produced from the CNC milled blanks composed of melted shredded plastic wrap.
2022 Participants
Kevin Hernandez, Drake Howard, Jackson Karnes, Sydney Lough, Steve Ngandu-Sankayi, Parker Selin, Emily White
2022 – 2023 Student Assistants
Kay Bailey, Mariana Mesa Castillo, Nathaniel Cooper, Trey Davis III, Chase Faulkner, Qamar Ghazi, Kyle Heffernan, Destiny Laing, Chris Marra, Pasha Mohaghegh, Melisa Nava, Anemone Rishel, Benjamin Rudloff, Miles Smith
This project could not have been completed without the help and support of the Challenge Grant Team, UK Office of Sustainability, Facilities Management, and the entire CoD FabLab team including:
Joe Brewer, Director of Technology and Facilities
Sophia Thomas, Fabrication Lab Manager
Alec Whisman, Design Technology Specialist
We would also like to thank:
Hannah Jackson, Design Tech Specialist, Pooya Mohaghegh, faculty in Product Design, and Owen Sadrzadeh, faculty in Interiors, for fabrication tutorials and shop assistance in the early stages of the project and John Maddox, Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, for assistance in testing early tile prototypes.
Image Gallery
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