Materia is in Hong Kong this week for the Retail Asia event. To get us all warm for the show, here’s a recent Hong Kong project that makes wonderful use of upcycled materials. It’s a park pavilion by local collective Daydreamers Design.

The dome is a temporary pavilion and is called Rising Moon, for its hemispherical shape and its nightly colour. This colour is created by covering a steel dome-shaped frame with plastic water bottles, and lighting each one with internal LED fixings.

For the skin, the plastic bottles are used that we recognize from water coolers all around the world. Here’s some food for thought: the designers collected almost 7000 of these PET containers for the Rising Moon dome. Staggeringly, these represent just 15 minutes’ worth of bottled water consumption in Hong Kong. So it would take over 35,000 such domes to represent a year’s water supply – and that would cover 14 sq km, an area the size of a small city.

The dome is 20 m across, and its construction is a geodesic steel structure made of 148 triangular steel components. These were bolted together on-site in six different configurations. The result is a sturdy, stable dome that easily supports the weight of the PET flasks. LED lighting is incorporated for visual effects.

Rising Moon is a reference to the Chinese traditional festival of reunion. An opening has been left in the dome’s surface to allow the moon’s light to pass through at the right moment, while during the rest of the year, the PET bottles are lit up like soft, blue, Chinese lanterns.

As a finishing touch, the plastic half-moon becomes a whole dome by being reflected in the water it’s placed in. A very efficient method to double the dome’s (apparent) size!

Images by John Pilas. Information via A Design Award.