A monument to the things we throw away loses its home.

By Kristi Cameron
July 2001

Above: Frank Gardner at work in the American Detritus Institute, New Bedford, Massachusetts. It was demolished earlier this summer to make way for development.
The nineteenth-century mill in New Bedford, Massachusetts, that housed the American Detritus Institute (ADI) was scrapped earlier this summer to make way for new commercial development. Frank Gardner, a furniture designer by training, founded the ADI in 1997 because he was preoccupied with consumer waste. "Recycling answers waste in one way," Gardner says. "Making things back into functional objects is another solution."

To Gardner a functional object is anything that harbors our cultural memory. Some things do that better than others. "We develop relationships with furniture in a weird way--things that are actually part of our habitats, that people nest with until the drawer falls off the dresser and it's obsolete and goes outside." He "repairs" the items he gathers on trash-collection nights in Providence, Rhode Island, by juxtaposing them in meaningful ways. For example, he represented the curbside plenitude of broken chairs ("In my mind it's an avalanche") by piling them in a precarious-looking heap. "When we put out our own garbage and there's one or two things in it, that's one thing," he says. "When you see a whole room that's full of ten years worth of things we've thrown out--durable goods--it has quite an impact."

THE METROPOLIS OBSERVED:
Nigeria's design for democracy; bringing the Rural Studio to Manhattan; farewell Detritus Institute; don't fence Droog in; L.A. needs parks-- Portland doesn't; remembering Sarah Tomerlin Lee; disposable cell phones; the Wexner Center deconstructs; private parks in public places.
Often the things he finds--like mutilated dolls or a fleld full of empty Absolut Citron vodka bottles--tell their own story. "I feel like an urban archaeologist discovering the footprint of consumer society," he says. "Or at least the droppings."

Now that the Detritus Institute has been consigned to the dustbin of history, Gardner won't be reproducing it in another location--but he won't be trashing the collection either. "I like to imagine sections like a sourdough starter where I could take one away and build an entirely different environment from it."


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