Tuesday, March 06, 2012

Reduce, reuse?

French architect Stephane Malka has envisioned a building facade made up entirely of wood pallets - including the suspended soffit seen above. While it looks very intriguing, and the idea seems sustainable at first glance, I can't help wondering about the weight of all those wood pallets. They are not a light weight cladding, and with a heavy cladding like that, the weight of the structure needed to support all of that weight would also get  pretty substantial, so there would be more steel - or concrete - raw material required for the structure. In the end, might this "out weigh" (ahem) the benefits to the environment you gain by  reusing the pallets?

Images via Architizer

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