2022 AA Prize for Unbuilt Work – Joint Winner

Jury citation

The transition to zero-carbon cities is a project of such complexity that it can leave everyday communities immobilized. Within this context, Gas Stack presents itself as a practical provocation, a “how to” 4D billboard of a project that is both smart and charming. Operating as a sort of pedagogic prototype, it offers a pocket-sized demonstration project that packages up waste-to-energy technology in a vertical pavilion. Comprising an industrial frame supporting an anaerobic digester, with counterculture inflatables holding biogas, this project draws on a lineage of Whole Earth Catalog DIY technology – but suffuses it with humour, fun and public amenity.

Harnessing the capacity of neighbourhoods to engage in real-life, real-time experiments in energy and waste transformation is a serious proposition. Small, distributed energy infrastructures like Gas Stack offer practical ways forward for urban and architectural transition projects precisely because they can be rolled out easily and are light on resources. What’s more, through a choreographed engagement with users, Gas Stack promotes other holistic community values: social interaction, collaboration, cooperative productive community gardening, recycling and basic technology upskilling. So, although it might appear an apparently modest speculation, Gas Stack constitutes an intelligent mashup of adaptive energy retrofit and innovative social infrastructure. In this way, it could be a critical piece of the zero-carbon puzzle – a concept to encourage broader urban transformation using small-scale, incremental architectures that rely on nature-based solutions.

Architect’s description

Gas Stack is a waste-to- energy plant suspended in a repurposed electricity transmission tower, creating an ecosystem of organic waste disposal, energy production and plant cultivation. Sitting somewhere between a biotech lab and a vertical city, the structure acts as a host to the components of an anaerobic digester and a collection of architectural elements (curtain, stair and awning).

Through a process of energy exchange, food waste from the National Gallery of Victoria is transformed to produce three valuable resources: biogas, heat and fertilizer. The biogas feeds a generator to supply electricity to power the installation at night . The fertilizer is used to return lost nutrients to the soil for the growing of tea. Visitors are encouraged to engage with this circular process through the use of power to cook food and to boil water for tea .

The project unpacks the history of the machine in art, society and contemporary life, and overlays this with an iconographic representation of the climate issues that we face and an interconnected system that seeks to reposition us in relationship with the broader environment. It is both a performative and an interactive demonstration of a circular system that evokes intrigue and invites inquiry.

Although a proven technology, anaerobic digesters are not commonly used within urban contexts. As a self-sufficient form o f energy production, this proposal acts as a prototype for adapting this technology within urban environments and everyday spaces. By demonstrating this form of energy generation as a clean and beneficial process, we hope to invert the commonly held view that waste is something dirty, to be discarded and hidden in landfill (where it has devastating impacts on the environment). The proposal repositions the value of this technology as an integral part of our city and community, embedding ideas of energy, exchange and regeneration within the social and cultural fabric of the city.