University of Pennsylvania

BagasSeries: An Ode to Philadelphia’s Southeast Asian Market by Reimagining its Sugarcane Waste

runner-up winner

Yuanyi Cen, Tianqi Han, Yi Yang, Chun Zhou

BagasSeries transforms local sugarcane bagasse waste into useful products through material innovation and community collaboration at Philadelphia’s FDR Park Southeast Asian Market. By engaging vendors and park users through interviews and research, the project addresses daily bagasse waste from juicing stands. It creates a catalog of biocomposite products made from hyperlocal organic waste, using non-toxic binders and low-energy manufacturing. These products serve practical functions like signaling, resting, wrapping, and paving, supporting the market’s needs while reducing waste. BagasSeries fosters sustainability and community resilience by turning local waste into valuable, purpose-driven materials.

Laia Mogas-Soldevila is an Assistant Professor of Graduate Architecture and Director of DumoLab Research at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Laia's research focuses on new sustainable material practices bridging science, engineering and the arts. Her broader pedagogy supports novel theory and applied methods understanding materials and materialization in architecture. She has built scholarship over the past ten years reconsidering matter as a fundamental design driver and partnering with scientists to redesign it towards unprecedented capabilities. Laia holds an interdisciplinary doctorate bridging materials science, biomedical engineering, and design from Tufts University School of Engineering, two master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a licensed architect with a minor in Fine Arts by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia School of Architecture.