Recycling center in Bratislava

Faculty of Architecture and Design STU in Bratislava

Project idea

Our goal was to design a recycling center. Our land lot is located in Bratislava, Slovakia on Odborárska Street. It is an industrial part of the city. Next to the plot is a railway. This building is a place where you can separate every kind of waste. We also took care of the educational function of a building, by showing people the whole recycling process to make them more informed about the complexity of the whole process and how important recycling is to society.

Project description

The whole building is comprised of the network of enclosed areas, which have different heights. They are connected via a catwalk. The idea was to create an illusion of multiple buildings.

The functionality of the complex is also very important. There is a single road which leads to the complex. There is a gatehouse at the entrance to the complex. The road forks immediately after the gatehouse. One fork traverses the public area and the other traverses non-public area, which is used by employees and trucks. Visitors could decide whether they want to go to the public dock building or visit a museum.

Public dock building serves as a garbage collection point - people enter it by cars and dump garbage into containers. There are several types of containers, depending on the type of garbage they are used to collect. From there, individual containers are transported for sorting purposes into the central processing hall.

The museum contains an exhibition area, a restored furniture store, second hand, and a projection room. It is possible to come out onto the catwalk when accompanied by a guide. People can observe the separation from long horizontal windows when standing on it.

The two largest objects form the central processing hall of the building. Here garbage is divided into recycling groups and further separated, taken apart and also restored. On the other end of the central processing hall, separated garbage is loaded into trucks or onto a freight train and is transported to specialized recycling centers for further processing.

Two last but essential parts of the building are technical support part and employee part. The latter has its parking lot. It also has several dressing rooms, which are located near the entrance. One is for clean clothes, and the other is for dirty clothes. On the other end of the dressing rooms are exits into the central processing hall. Small canteen is located on the ground floor. The floor above is restricted to administrative workers. Director's office, open space, and meeting room are located here.

Technical information

The office part and visitors center are the only two parts that have two floors. Other parts have one floor only.

The main module is 3 m, and all other measures are derived from it. The main construction of the parts, except museum, is a prefabricated concrete skeleton (column spacing in the central processing is 9 m). The material was chosen because of its fireproof quality. T-shaped concrete precast beams are laid on the precast concrete column, which holds slab panels. The epoxy flooring was chosen because of the simplicity of maintenance.

Museum has a wooden main construction, and the ceiling is made of wooden beams. Two types of external cladding are utilized. First is made of wave-shaped aluminum facade panels and the other one is a translucent curtain walling made of the polycarbonate.

Building parts have extensive and intensive green roofs. Photovoltaic solar panels are placed onto some of them, as well as skylights for the center processing hall.