Garbage Kids is a collective of architects-turned-carpenters. The driving force behind their work is their frustration with a society that prioritises growth over sustainability and encourages overconsumption in a world with limited resources. In response, they use traditional craftsmanship and folk wisdom to create objects from found materials such as broken branches, scrap metal, and stones from abandoned quarries. Their practice strives to be intuitive, explorative, and free.
Luka Abashidze, Ulla Alla, and Nika Gabiskiria share their thoughts.
Using hand tools is, for us, a matter of both affordability and philosophy. They are accessible without having to take loans to buy machines or to rent large workshop spaces.
These tools, proven over millennia, allow us to create objects and spaces that endure: repairable, adaptable, and rooted in simple vernacular techniques. They compel us to slow down in a world where creation and labour are accelerated beyond measure.
Our choice of tools and techniques sets us apart from mainstream production and spatial design industries, where the very means of creativity are increasingly ‘taxed’ by megacorporations and where creative ownership is constantly contested. By working with hand tools and local materials, we remain in direct control, relying on fellow craftspeople and second-hand markets rather than consumerist trends.
We do whatever we want. We resist the narrow understanding of an architect as a specialist, rejecting professional clichés and traditional career paths. We cannot imagine doing architecture without farming, carpentry without tapestry, designing without building.
Our frustration extends beyond production methods but with contemporary everything. Being in charge of our work and our time allows us to carve out a tiny pirate island within this crazy world, to connect with like-minded people, especially in Estonia and Georgia, and to stay true to our values. We are community carpenters, helping our friends and family who help us in turn; we do this both in Garbage Kids projects and on our many side quests (farming, wine making, restoration, etc).
GARBAGE KIDS is an Estonian-Georgian collective of architect-carpenters. Garbage Kids are Luka Abashidze, Ulla Alla, and Nika Gabiskiria.
HEADER photo by Anano Paichadze.
PUBLISHED: MAJA 3/4-2025 (121-122) with main topic WORK AND FOOD
