The project proposes to introduce a self-enclosed material life cycle into an existing place. During the research stage, I have been working on the potential reuse of food waste to generate usable surface and membrane. The results made me question the life cycle of waste and its potential as a building material. The Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market was opened in 1913. Through time, it slowly turned into a place where improvisation and appropriation became prominent strategies of development, hence a relatively chaotic and globally inefficient aggregate of architectural and systemic outcomes.

Turning the Yau Ma Tei Wholesale Fruit Market into an experimental subject, the project explores the identification, sorting and use of all waste material, either already “digested” by the context or newly generated, to improve or create objects and spaces that can benefit its users. In parallel, the project seeks to rethink the market plan and occupation strategy to optimise this “self-enclosed” cycle. The ultimate aims are not only material or ecological as the whole process introduces alternatives solutions also at economical and community-living levels to our harmful current logic of production/consumption/disposal.