How will this age be remembered? What material or innovation will most define the current era? According to a new exhibition at London’s Design Museum, the typical feature isn’t a game-changing material but rubbish.
Waste Age, the theme of the exhibition, is a wake-up call, not so much to the consumers but to the producer and most importantly the government. lt is not intended to be a criticism of buying that take away coffee on your way to the museum or forgetting your cotton bag, but an eye opening look at the people working on creative solutions. “We want to show how design is best placed to address rubbish issues,” says Justin McGuirk, the exhibition leader.
A striking item on display is created by Ibrahim Mahama, who has built a giant wall of old TV monitors that play videos where workers burn abandoned electrical cables (电缆) to harvest precious metal. Mahamahas asked them to cast the recycled metal in the form of surrounds, which surround the giant wall on display.The poisonous burning scenes in the videos are desperate, but the message is clear; waste is precious.
“In many ways ‘waste’ is a category error,” says McGuirk. It’s often perfectly good material that simply undervalued.” The exhibition attracts designers who are already working on what a future of above-ground mining might look like and exploring how objects and buildings can be taken apart and their parts reused. There is the work of the pioneering Belgian group Rotor, a team of architects who set up a company to carefully remove materials and components from buildings scheduled for the breaking hammer.
The final section of the exhibition moves beyond fixing and recycling to imagine a post-waste world where materials are grown rather than extracted (提炼), like sea stone “on display, a concrete-like material made from seashell pieces. But such biodegradable (可生物降解的) solutions come with a problem: how many times have you thrown a biodegradable container in the garbage can before realizing it is actually compost (混合肥料)? However, we can adjust behaviour and expectations to meet the promising new bio-future.
【小题1】What is the purpose of the exhibition?| A．To display the most widely used material. |
| B．To criticize the current throwaway culture. |
| C．To show possible solutions to waste problems. |
| D．To inform the customers of the harm from rubbish. |
| A．He collects old TV monitors for the exhibition. |
| B．He shows the way to recycle waste into new surrounds. |
| C．He treats the recycled material in a biodegradable way. |
| D．He recycles metal from used electrical cables in person. |
| A．To give a new definition of waste. |
| B．To present the creativity of its architects. |
| C．To make a prediction about recyclable buildings. |
| D．To clarify the concept of above-ground mining. |
| A．Favorable. | B．Doubtful. |
| C．Intolerant. | D．Conventional. |
