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Here's what cities might look like if our waste pipes were out in the open

ecoschool interior perspective
CMU

Would we use less water if we knew just how much came shooting out of our faucets and shower heads?

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Two architecture students at Carnegie Mellon University certainly think so.

Sophie Nahrmann and Sinan Goral are the brains behind Ecoschool, a bundle of tubes and pipes that would live outside a city's apartment buildings to remind residents the volume of resources they consume on a daily basis.

ecoschool site render
CMU

The design recently won the "Most Innovative" and "People's Choice" awards at this year's Flux Emerging Architects Design Competition.

Nahrmann and Goral say their design touches on a couple of emerging concerns related to how people live. On the one hand, the approach "heightens the awareness of climate change," the team explains in an online project description. It also "hints at a futurist, technology-empowered housing strategy."

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ecoschool process model
CMU

The team members emphasize that while their designs might look otherworldly, they perform the same functions as the ones that snake through people's existing homes and offices.

"They challenge the common practice of burying such systems underground by revealing the utilities needed for housing and other amenities, creating a beautiful and enigmatic network logic," Nahrmann and Goral write.

ecoschool model
CMU

In the US, people waste approximately one trillion gallons of water each year — just from leaky faucets alone. In fact, the US Geological Survey finds that one drip per minute adds up to 34 gallons of water a year. That doesn't even account for too-long showers, kitchen sinks running for no reason, and people over-watering their lawns, all of which lead to millions of unused gallons.

Nahrmann and Goral's design would force people to confront these mindless moments of waste. We just hope the sewage pipe won't be transparent.

Innovation
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