Macro Sea is the development company behind some of the more unique urban projects we’ve seen pop up in recent years. The first such project from the New York-based firm, whose ventures combine elements of art, environmentalism and urban renewal, involved converting dumpsters into mobile swimming pools. This evolved into their most recent endeavor: the Mobile Pool project in New York City, where dumpsters-turned-pools, flanked by decks, were set up on Park Avenue as a sort of country club. The company utilizes materials (oftentimes junk) and space in unexpected, interactive and visceral ways. We spoke with founder David Belt about his goal to reinvent the American strip mall, recent projects like Glassphemy!—which involved people hurling bottles at each other behind bulletproof glass—and the potential for brands in these unique ventures.

What’s Macro Sea’s elevator pitch?

It’s a company that we started to do projects we found interesting. And the types of things we find interesting are projects that look at materials or space or concepts a little bit differently and a little bit more creatively. And also projects that are interactive in nature, so that people can have a visceral experience rather than just an intellectual experience.

What inspired you to found Macro Sea in the first place?

Well, I’m a commercial developer, so I’ve built many real estate projects for myself and partners and also for others: for universities, for non-for-profits and for other private developers. I started feeling like the projects I was doing—although some of them were really nice—weren’t really making a difference or creating any type of questioning of the world we live in. And the economy changed pretty significantly and I started trying to think about space and building in a little bit of a different way.

I wanted to reinvent the American strip mall. [A few years ago] I got to do a beautiful project in Rome, and I converted this building that was in disrepair. It was an old seminary that used to train priests. I was going back and forth from New York to Rome a lot and I remember, I was at my parents’ house. They live in the suburbs outside of Philadelphia. I was driving around and I was like, “Man, I hate it here. Why do I hate it here so much?” And it was because there was no sense of place. So I started really thinking about it and looking at all these abandoned strip malls and I thought, “Man, it’s one thing to take a beautiful old building in Rome and just fix it up and make it a beautiful, refurbished building, but what could we do? It’s our legacy as Americans. All these crappy junk spaces everywhere—what can we do with those? That would really be a challenge. If we could do something interesting with those, with that crappy stucco architecture, that would really be something.”

So I started trying to re-imagine it; I worked with a lot of architects and designers, and we started playing with concepts of what you could do to make them a more engaging space—not so that you could sell more stuff but so that you could engage people to reuse the space in a more interesting way.

What was your first project, and what was the motivation behind it?

We were [looking at] shopping centers in Georgia, and we heard that this guy had made a swimming pool out of a dumpster because it was really hot. The person who was taking us around was saying that as a joke, just to tell us, “Hey it’s so hot here [and there] aren’t enough pools that they made one out of a dumpster. And I thought, ‘Man, that is such a great idea.’” And so we did that project to see if we could get people to engage and use, basically, a parking lot as a country club. We thought that would be great—if we could do that in old, abandoned strip malls and have recreation as part of the experience of going there. So that’s what led to the dumpster pool project.

One of your latest projects was called Glassphemy!—people recycled glass by releasing pent-up rage, if you will. They were invited to hurl bottles at other people behind the bulletproof glass of a long steel tower. What was the inspiration behind this one, and what is the greater purpose?

I was invited to speak at this symposium in Philadelphia. The point was to take a look at industrial spaces in Philadelphia and repurpose them. The audience and participants were architects and urban planners and designers. And they each took an industrial lot and did some design work and presented to myself and other people on the panel. And there was this one lot [with] tons of broken glass everywhere, and all these people are saying, “How do we engage the public so that they stop breaking glass in this lot?” And this one woman stood up and she said, “Why don’t we just make it a place where we can break glass? I love breaking glass!” And I just thought, man, that’s such a great idea. I thought that was brilliant and she was, I guess, sort of joking.

And then we started designing it. At first I made it a kind of horizontal thing because I wanted to make it safe. So it was like you’d have to throw the glass across a moat. And then we said, let’s make it more vertical. We built it in Philadelphia in panels and we brought it to New York and made it so we could take it on tour. We built it out of bulletproof glass and steel tubes—it was pretty sturdy. Then we did an interactive thing with it where we miked the tube seals, essentially, so when you throw the bottle there’s a light-up situation going on.

So cool.

Yeah, people liked it for a few reasons: One, not many people, in New York in particular, have ever smashed a bottle. I mean, not the people who would come to our thing, anyway. You know, they’d put the recycling out and it goes away somewhere—so for them to actually interact with it that viscerally is cool. Secondly, to throw glass at each other? That’s insane. And when you’re on the other side of the bulletproof glass and someone’s throwing a bottle at you … like, my wife threw one at me? It really is scary. And I built the thing so I knew it was going to hold up, but still somewhere in the back of your mind you go, “I hope this holds up. It looks like it’s really going to hurt.”

What do you do with the glass once it’s all broken up? Anything else besides recycling?

Yeah, we did a lot with it. We worked with a magazine called ReadyMade. They had a contest and they got tons of entries about what to do with the broken glass. Actually, Glassphemy! is going to be featured in DesignPhiladelphia in October. ReadyMade will announce the winner there. We’re building the winning entry and the winner doesn’t even know. [Also] people sent a lot of recycling ideas directly to us, and everyone who sent a good idea got invited to come to the Glassphemy! [event] in Brooklyn.

Also, I was trying for the longest time to get the glass community to come—the glass-blowing community, the art community. I was calling them for months and no one would talk to me. And they all just thought I was crazy. But then The New York Times article came out and these two brave glass blowers [Deborah Czeresko and Kim Harty] called me. The last event we had, they got a full-on kiln and took the glass from the container and melted it down and made these super-cool objects—on-site, in front of people! So it was like a performance of glass blowing. It was heavy duty.

We also made some lights, where we had a smaller container inside a larger container, and in between we had glass shards so that the light would kind of go through the glass and make these cool patterns.

Mostly it was an engagement with other people.

Are your projects more about the “cool” factor or more about the environment?

I actually don’t think it’s either. Obviously, I think the project’s cool or I wouldn’t want to do it, right? I guess the cool factor is based on my group of people here at Macro Sea—that we think it’s a project worth doing.

In terms of the environment, the whole idea behind recycling and the way that brands and advertising are using this green movement is getting kind of gross. And it’s also very transparent to the public that when oil companies are showing cheetahs running and saying how green they are, no one’s buying it, right? But there’s this religion around recycling—that everyone has to get in line and that [brands] have to have a green statement or a green face to the public or no one’s going to buy their stuff, right? If you go against that religion, it’s kind of “blasphemy,” so that’s why we called it Glassphemy!. So it was almost a little bit of a social commentary about recycling and also having people interact with it in a more visceral and psychological way [rather] than just putting it up in these blue bins and out on the street.

The dumpster pools were about taking junk space and taking it back, and we just did Summer Streets [in New York]—it was thrilling for us to work with the DOT [Department of Transportation]. They’re the ones who closed Times Square. And just the way they think about the city and space—they are wonderful to work with and the mayor’s office, too. And we’re doing some other projects that make you look at what garbage is or what space is, but I don’t want to pigeonhole us as an environmental company.

Macro Sea’s site states that the firm “makes things on the cheap so people can copy and improve on them.” Have you seen people copy your projects?

There was a lot of interest in doing do-it-yourself dumpster pools. And people have sent us pictures of some pools they made of containers and stuff, which I thought was pretty interesting. The whole idea is that if people like what we’re doing and it inspires them to do something that they find interesting or kind of questions and challenges what’s going on, that’s great. If it triggers an idea, I don’t want to be super-protective of the idea. I want people to copy it.

Have big brand names been inspired by your projects? Did any get involved with Summer Streets?

We got a lot solicitation for Summer Streets. We decided with the city just to make it a city project; we—Macro Sea, the DOT and the mayor’s office—didn’t want to dilute the project. For future projects, we are definitely open to getting brands involved.

You’ve called Macro Sea a creative mission—would you go so far as to call your projects art?

Well, I wouldn’t. I mean, I don’t think I’m any more or any less of an artist than anybody else. [Laughs.] You can take that for what it’s worth, but I’m a developer, you know. I design stuff, I build stuff, and I also develop buildings and projects. And I’m happy to be a developer. I also like that being a developer has such a usually negative connotation. I like that people always think, “What? You’re a developer? Why are you doing this? Why don’t you call it art or something?” But I just think that would be more pretentious and less impactful.

Has there been any response from environmental groups to your projects?

For the people who get it, the people who understand that we’re not trying to make a global, environmental statement, it’s been very positive. There are other people who are writing to us, “What are you doing? This isn’t very environmental. You have lights hooked up to it. Why are you using power?” I mean, we’re trying to get a point across—we’re not trying to say we’re living a completely off-the-grid existence. So it’s been a mixed response, but most of it’s been very positive.

Any other ideas for how might you incorporate brands and advertising into these projects?

Well, for example, we’re doing this project in Detroit—a found objects skate park. And we are going to skateboard companies and foundations to help support that. The goal would be that we would make a destination for skaters to come to Detroit and also get some famous skaters and skateboard companies behind it to help teach kids how to skateboard in their backyards.

Otherwise, if there are other brands that want to get together and help me create the ultimate repurposed strip mall project, where I could make it into a community center that would have some retail and some of the other elements that I want to do, that would be positive.

What’s on your things to watch list?

There’s a huge movement right now with interactive media, and there’s also this huge movement around authenticity and creating peer-to-peer experiences versus retailer-to-consumer experiences. I think people love the idea that their participation is being felt in an interactive way. So if you look at some artists right now who are doing things where they’re using biometrics or people’s body mass or body temperature or their pulse rate in an area to create a visual representation of it—there’s going to be a lot more of that as the technology increases. And that creates a powerful interactive experience with the fact that because you’re in a place, you’re having an impact on the environment. Take a look at Pulse Park, which is a pretty good example of what I’m talking about.

Photo credits: Bryan Perido, David Belt and Antonia Wagner