Text: Bureau SLA | Photography courtesy of Filip Dujardin and Bureau SLA
People’s Pavilion won the Frame Awards in category Sustainable Design, The Dutch Design Awards in the category Habitat, and the ARC18 Innovation Award.
The People’s Pavilion is designed to promote the value of a closed-loop, or “circular”, construction system, which involves thinking beyond the life of the building, so that little or no waste is produced as a result.

The pavilion is a design statement of the new circular economy, a 100% circular building where no building materials are lost in construction. The designers of bureau SLA and Overtreders W have accomplished this with a radical new approach: all of the materials needed to make the 250 m2 building are borrowed. Not only materials from traditional suppliers and producers, but also from Eindhoven residents themselves. And to be clear, it’s not 70% or 80% or even 95%, but 100% of the materials: concrete and wooden beams, lighting, facade elements, glass roof, recycled plastic cladding, even the Pavilion’s glass roof, all of which will be returned completely unharmed – with one special exception – to the owners following the DDW.
The exception? The striking colored tiles that make up the Pavilion’s upper facade, made from plastic household waste materials collected by Eindhoven residents, will be distributed among those very residents at the end of DDW. 100% borrowed means a construction site without screws, glue, drills or saws. This, in turn, leads to a new design language: the People’s Pavilion reveals a new future for sustainable building: a powerful design with new collaborations and intelligent construction methods.
Facts & figures
design: bureau SLA & Overtreders W
designers: Peter van Assche, Hester van Dijk, Reinder Bakker
client: Dutch Design Foundation
structural engineering: Arup
urban Mining advies: New Horizon
main builder: Ham & Sybesma, Amsterdam
From trash to tile: 100% plastic waste
Facade claddings meet high technical demands. Every cladding has to be completely wind- and waterproof. It has to protect against fire and last in extreme weather conditions. It doesn’t come as a surprise that the development of true sustainable facade materials has been proven difficult. Recently, the company Pretty Plastic has developed a tile that consists entirely of recycled PVC building material waste. Because only waste streams are being used in the production process every tile is slightly different, which gives facades a natural look. The tiles are fully fireproof certified and can be applied on any building. By both cleaning up waste streams and producing a cladding material that can be endlessly recycled in the future, the Pretty Plastic tile truely contributes to a circular economy: from trash to tile. Over and over again.
Pretty Plastic aims to produce cladding products made of upcycled plastic waste that look great are safe in use, easy to apply, and last forever.
Pretty Plastic contributes to a circular economy where waste does not exist and raw materials are used over and over again.
The Cladding material from upcycled plastic is for sale via the Pretty Plastic website.