Ilyas Bouachik, Louis Gröbli and Arthur Lemaire from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles have managed to create a beautiful combination of plastic and metal. We particularly like the industrial, unfinished, rough cuts paired with bright colors so typical of plastic after a little compression moulding treatment 🔥. We’ve reached out to them and asked them a few questions.

UPDATED 14-04-2017

We are three master students in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles, when asked to think about the design process, the materiality and the shape of an object for our last semester we immediately thought of using Precious Plastic. We built our own shredder to enable us to manipulate different kinds of materials.

We are quite familiar with working with wood, concrete or steel, this is why we were quite excited to learn more about plastic. And it’s recycling abilities are outstanding. We eventually tried to think about a new machine to mould or shape the plastic while it was molten. Unfortunately, we ran out of time to design a new machine, this is why with chose to create an aluminium mould that we milled with a CNC machine.

Placing the aluminium mould with shredded plastic pieces inside a heat source was quite easy reslting is an efficient “cooking” process. Finally cooling it with tap water and waiting a while allows us to unmold our triangular plastic shapes. We imagined the plastic pieces like a puzzle or small objects that could be joined together with a hair-straightener, it worked fine as well.

We also designed a small chair made of recycled plastic with the same process. The only issue we had for some of our objects was controlling the cooling of the plastic. Some areas cool out at different speeds pulling plastic from other areas and creating small stalagmites, however it doesn’t happen this often.

P.S. : we’ve tried to cook many kinds of plastics, but it seems that the ABS, the PE and PP work out the best as they melt quite easily without burning, and are really simple to unmold.
P.S. 2 : we’ve also tried different heating and cooking processes: with an oven, with a panini or waffle cooker, with pots and pans on cooking plates and finally our aluminum mold and they all work quite well.

We really enjoyed working with plastic and received a great mark from our teachers 😃 partly thanks to you. We wish the Precious Plastic community great luck for your future projectsSincerely yours, Ilyas

Ilyas Bouachik, Louis Gröbli and Arthur Lemaire.

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