Five tons of ocean plastic is sculpted into a 38-foot-tall whale
Canadian Plastics
EnvironmentPlastic waste fished from the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans has been sculpted into a 38-foot-tall whale in Bruges, Belgium as part of the city’s Triennial Bruges 2018: Liquid City event.
A Brooklyn, N.Y.-based architecture and design firm has put five tons of plastic waste fished from the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans to good use, sculpting it into a 38-foot-tall whale in Bruges, Belgium as part of the city’s Triennial Bruges 2018: Liquid City event.
Architecture and design firm StudioKCA collaborated with Hawaii Wildlife Fund to collect all the plastic used in Skyscraper from Hawain beaches over a period of four months.
Image via StudioKCA.
The plastic ocean waste was cleaned and sorted by size and colour, and then attached to wire mesh that covered an aluminum and steel frame work in the shape of the whale. The sculpture was first built in Brooklyn, before it was taken apart into 107 individual pieces and shipped to Bruges for the reconstruction.
Image via StudioKCA.
“Pound for pound, there is more plastic waste from our cities swimming in the ocean than there are whales,” StudioKCA said. “A whale, breaching from the water, is the first ‘skyscraper of the sea,’ and as the largest mammal in the water, it felt like the right form for our piece to take in order to show the scope and scale of the problem.”
Image via StudioKCA.
Skyscraper (the Bruges Whale) is visible near Bruges’s Jan Van Eyck statue as part of the Bruges Triennial, which runs until September 16, 2018.
