Announcement

FOREWORD:

Sustainable Architecture is a 2021 Architecture Essay Competition, organized by Archiol. Sustainability in architecture is achieved with the use of design strategies in the built environment that reduce the negative environmental impact. Environment that is built based on ecological principles and resource efficiency. The competition, Sustainable Architecture was looking for essay submissions on the topic of sustainability in architecture.

This competition aimed at exploring Sustainability in Architecture.

Read full articles and winning entries on the organizer’s website.

https://www.archiol.com/archiol-competition/sustainable_architecture_writing_competition

1st Prize Winner
Name: Mohamad Alamin Younis (@Archi.Collage)

Title: Towards the Metamorphosis of the Landfill: Turning Garbage Dumps into Proactive Parks

Are people truly aware of the serious impact that the rapidly growing mountains of trash have on the natural and built environment? 

If we look at how waste is segregated, collected, and finally disposed, we could see how unsustainable this is for the built environment. Most cities around the globe follow a linear model in their operation: a flow of input/supply- be it energy, water, people, food, vehicles, and material – is processed and consumed resulting into an output flow of sewage, garbage, waste, and pollution. Such an unsustainable operation necessitates that every city designates a “backyard” to dispose of its output on a site that is out of its sight. The impact of such statement is seen at the social and urban level of most cities, where the public is totally absent in these highly industrial areas. It is safe to say that when the flow of the public is cut from the waste management sector, people are less likely to know about their anthropic actions. 

For this essay, I have chosen the saturated dump of Tripoli, the city where I live. Located at the delta of the polluted city river, this backyard is composed of a 60,000 m2 garbage landfill with a volume of 3,000,000 m3, a centralized sewage treatment plant, a wholesale vegetable market, and a municipal slaughterhouse. Today, Tripoli is forced not only to find a solution for the produced pollution and serious health damaging environment affecting the whole city, but to respond to pressures of population and urban growth by “unlocking” the surrounding remaining 5% of the city undeveloped vacant area and regaining a vital access of the public to an important natural asset of the waterfront(Figure 2).When understanding the environmental limitations of the waste management sector and its required facilities, design strategies could propose an added sustainable value to the built-up environment. The use of the term “sustainable” in not solely bound by the ecological performance of architecture, but also encompasses people’s awareness to practice sustainability. Thus, when preparing the public to intervene in the workflow of the waste sector, architecture is premised on the capacity of design (urban and architecture included) to address ill-defined/”wicked” problems similar to the one at hand.

Architecture design strategies must therefore answer: how is man meeting the machine in the context of sustainable design?