Dome – PETMAT

Rising Moon

The floating geodesic dome Rising Moon was designed for the autumn festival “lantern wonderland” 2013 in Victoria Park in Hong Kong by the local architecture firm named Daydreamers. The dome has a 20 meter diameter, and for the surface covering 4800 five gallon (22,7 liter) polycarbonate water containers were used. These containers were mounted into a network of electric sockets with LED lighting. The sphere’s surface was triangulated – each triangle carried about 28 water containers. The main structure is a steel rod frame. The bottles were chosen for their resemblance with traditional Chinese beacon-shaped lanterns. In the interior of the dome 2300 regular PET bottles are suspended from the ceiling providing the effect of the sea. Since the pavilion is floating, the whole appears to be a complete sphere because of the reflection of the water. By manipulating the LED lights, multiple phases of the moon can be simulated on the surface – hence the name of the pavilion. Additionally in the top of the pavilion there is an opening in the roof which allows the real moonlight pass through the pavilion. According to Daydreamers architects, the whole building can be de-assembled and the parts (bottles) recycled.

Moon reflection diagram: pic. Jay Ho Ka Wong

Rising Moon during daylight, photo: Bob Cheung

Head in the Clouds

Head in the clouds is a pavilion built on the occasion of figment’s 2013 ‘city of dreams art celebration’ in New York. The sculpture was assembled by Jason Klimoski and Wesley Chang from KCA architects, who needed 53,780 recycled plastic bottles and milk containers – this amount is consumed in NYC in about 1 hour. While the milk jugs form the exterior cloud visually, the interior is created from smaller 16 and 24 ounce PET bottles filled with blue colour water evocating the feeling of being in the middle of a cloud. This all is held up with an aluminium frame. The structure can shelter approximately 50 people. The installation ran for approximately 2 months from february 2013.

Head in the Clouds section, picture: Lesley Chang

Plastic Bottle Greenhouse

Jasmine Zimmerman created an open-roofed spherical house which measures 12 x 12 x 6 feet (3.6 x 3.6 x 1.8 meter) created out of thousands of PET bottles. With this structure she wanted to point out the fact that Americans waste over 30 billion of PET bottles a year, only 10% of which are recycled.
The structure is created by glueing PET bottles together with hot glue pistol (which by the way renders the bottles unrecyclable in any normal fashion). As an object for raising awareness it can be considered successful however, because she made two installations at festivals (Bumbershoot and City Sol Festival in New York) where people themselves actually added their disposable PET bottles to the structure. In that way the structure grew in an almost organic fashion and people were more directly confronted with the waste issue.

PETAngel

PETree

The project of PETree was started by PET-MAT (Nováková – Prokop) and Experimental studio Achten-Nováková at Fa CTU Prague with support of KMV a.s. It is a pilot project of an experimental construction made by selfbearing PET-bottle structure in form of a 5 meters tall christmas tree. The structure is hollow and works as an exhibition room in order to mediate information on the facts about reusable waste, focused on plastic garbage, represented by PET bottles. The tree has the aim to show the value of plastic PET garbage and its unbelievable quantity, which depends on consumers: all of us. The tree consists of 12 thousand 1,5l PET bottles, connected by wireframe and ropes. One Primary school and twelve highschools from Prague, Mladá Boleslav, Kolín, Slaný and Sedlčany took part on collection and they were also building a construction panel with decoration. The tree is enlightened at night with interesting lightshow delivered by IIM CVUT Prague. The PETree exhibition is open daily from 9 AM to 10 PM.

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