Georgia Tech Exhibition in Atlanta Showcases Furniture Made from Recycled Plastics
Atlanta – August 14, 2025
A new exhibition at Atlanta Contemporary is rethinking how we view plastic waste. They are turning it into functional furniture with both design and conceptual value. Organized by students from the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, the show features 13 reinterpretations of the iconic Adirondack chair. All are made from recycled HDPE and PLA plastics collected from campus waste streams and local recycling facilities.
Project Background and Academic Context
The idea emerged from the ARCH 6050: Architectural Studio Design + Research course at Georgia Tech, led by architecture professor Hyojin Kwon. During the spring of 2025, students collected, cleaned, and processed discarded plastics themselves. These ranged from everyday packaging to failed 3D prints. They integrated both institutional and community partnerships into the design process.
Design Methodology and Fabrication Techniques
Instead of concealing signs of prior use, the students embraced them as part of the design’s identity. This includes marbled colors, embedded labels, and irregular textures. The fabrication process included shredding and pressing plastic into sheets, CNC milling, and custom casting. Computational modeling guided form development to ensure both comfort and durability.
Cultural and Functional Reinterpretation
Choosing the Adirondack chair as the starting point allowed the students to work with a design combining ergonomic complexity and cultural symbolism. The symbolism is tied to leisure in natural settings. In this project, however, the chair is transformed into an urban object crafted entirely from reclaimed plastic. This reframes its meaning in today’s context. The resulting designs range from monolithic structures to modular systems, voxel-based forms, and hybrid compositions.
Public Engagement and Exhibition Layout
The exhibition space has been arranged as an interactive seating environment. It invites visitors to sit in the chairs and experience them firsthand. Supporting photographs and video installations document every stage of the process from collection and sorting to fabrication. This emphasizes sustainability as a practical, integrated process, rather than a theoretical or marketing concept.
Broader Horizons for Sustainable Design
According to the project team, the initiative began as an academic exercise to foster material literacy and circular design. However, its public debut has opened the door to wider applications, such as adaptive reuse of local waste streams. This includes community fabrication workshops and integrating recycled materials into everyday life.
✦ ArchUp Editorial Insight
This article covers an academic project from Georgia Tech focused on recycling plastics into innovative reinterpretations of the Adirondack chair. The images reveal marbled colors, embedded labels, and irregular textures, with compositions ranging from monolithic blocks to modular forms. While the visual concept is clear, the contextual link between this furniture and broader urban environments feels underexplored. This raises questions about its adaptability beyond the gallery setting. Nonetheless, the project stands out as a hands-on educational model that integrates sustainability with design. It offers a framework that could evolve to support wider community-based fabrication initiatives.
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