A giant whale in London.
Made of beach plastic.

An 11-metre whale is leaping out of a dock in east London, surrounded by glass office towers. Get closer and it comes apart into crates, baskets, bottles and everyday objects, each carrying traces of a previous life.

That shift is what caught our attention: not just the reuse of plastic, but how it makes people stop and look.

Installed at Wood Wharf in April 2025, Whale on the Wharf (Skyscraper) was created by Jason Klimoski and Lesley Chang of New York-based StudioKCA. In 2026, it won the Best Project – Innovation Award at the ICE London Awards.

Around five tonnes of discarded plastic

StudioKCA worked with the Hawaii Wildlife Fund to gather marine plastic from Hawaiian beaches. Around five tonnes of recovered waste went into creating the whale, in shades of blue and white that suggest the movement of water.

There is a deliberate contradiction in the form. A whale is one of the ocean's most recognisable animals, yet here its body is made from the rubbish entering its habitat. The materials aren't merely a surface finish. They carry the idea.

“A whale is the largest mammal in the water, and it felt like the right form to take in order to show the scope and scale of the problem,” say Klimoski and Chang.

The more time you spend looking, the less the whale resembles a single object. Its individual pieces begin to stand out, each one something that might once have been used, discarded and washed away.

Even the part you can't see has a story

The reuse of materials continues below the waterline. The sculpture is supported by a structure made from recovered steel. For the underwater foundation, a special concrete mix incorporates biochar made partly from spent coffee grounds collected at Canary Wharf cafés and restaurants.

It's an unusually thoughtful detail for a work most people encounter from the pavement. The public sees the whale; the supporting engineering follows the same idea of finding a second use for discarded material.

From Bruges to Wood Wharf

The whale is not a new creation. First presented as Skyscraper for the 2018 Bruges Triennial in Belgium, the sculpture arrived in London in 2025. The change of setting gives it another dimension: what began as a striking intervention in a historic canal now sits among London's high-rise offices and busy pedestrian streets.

What makes the work so effective is that it doesn’t start with a statistic or an explanation. First, you notice a whale in the middle of the city. Then you look closer. Something beautiful becomes something unsettling, one plastic object at a time.

For anyone trying to communicate a complex issue, that’s the lesson: show the idea first, explain it later.

4 November 2026