Bottle wall

A bottle wall is a wall made out of glass bottles and binding material.

Bottle Wall Construction

A building construction style which usually uses 1l glass bottles (although mason jars, 1/2l glass jugs, ... may be used as well) as masonry units and binds them using adobe, sand, cement, stucco, clay, plaster, mortar or any other joint compound to result in an intriguing stained-glass like wall. An alternative is to make the bottle wall from 1/2l glass jugs filled with (preferably organic) ink and set them up by supporting them between 2 windows. [ [http://www.motherearthnews.com/Green-Homes/1976-11-01/The-Integral-Urban-House.aspx?page=6 Building a bottle wall] ]

Construction

Construction materials

Although bottle walls can be constructed in many different ways, bottle walls are typically made on a foundation that is set into a trench in the earth to add stability to the wall. The trench is filled with a rubble of pea gravel and then filled in with cement. Rebar can be set into the foundation to add structural integrity. Bottle walls range from using one bottle as a filler in a thin wall to making walls two bottles thick. Most intriguing though, is the wall made from bottles cut in half, matched, and joined to another bottle of the same size and color. Primitive mixture, such as cob or adobe, are made from a mix of sand, clay, and straw. This is used as the mortar to bind the bottles. It is thickly spread on the previous layer of bottles followed by the next layer which is pressed into the mixture. Typically two fingers of separation are used as a means of spacing although any kind of spacing can be achieved.

Bottles can also be duct taped together to create a window-type effect. Two similar size bottles can be taped together with the openings allowing a light passage way. This also traps air and creates a small amount of insulation. Filling glass with liquid that will be subjected to freezing and thawing is not a good idea, but is useful if the glass is protected from temperature extremes.

Heat sink

When the bottles are filled with a (dark) liquid, or other dark material, the wall can function as a urban heat island, absorbing and radiating light/heat. As such, when the wall is placed correctly, heat may be taken up from sunshine in the morning and during the day and can be radiated during the entire day and especially at night, when the building cools (especially in northern, colder climates).

Binding Mixtures

A typical mortar mix is 3:1 mason sand to a pozzalan (fly ash) cement mix. Other mixtures could be made from mortar and clay, adobe, cob, sand or cement. Bottle walls are extremely versatile and could be bonded with pretty much anything that can endure its given climate.

Bottle Houses Throughout History

The use of empty vessels in construction dates back at least to ancient Rome, where many structures used empty amphorae embedded in concrete. This was not done for aesthetic reasons, but to lighten the load of upper levels of structures, and also to reduce concrete usage. This technique was used for example in the Circus of Maxentius.

It is believed that the first bottle house was constructed in 1902 by William F. Peck in Tonopah, Nevada. The house was built using 10,000 bottles of beer from Jhostetter's Stomach Bitters which were 90% alcohol and 10% opium. The Peck house was demolished in the early 1980s.

Around 1905, Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, using 51,000 beer bottles masoned with adobe. Kelly chose bottles because trees were scarce in the desert. Most of the bottles were Busch beer bottles collected from the 50 bars in this Gold Rush town. Rhyolite became a ghost town by 1920. In 1925, Paramount Pictures discovered the Bottle House and had it restored for use in a movie. It then became a museum, but tourism was slow, causing it to close. From 1936-1954, Lewis Murphy took care of the house and hosted tourists. From 1954-1969, Tommy Thompson occupied the house. He tried to make repairs to the house with concrete which, when mixed with the desert heat, caused many bottles to crack (Kelly had used adobe mud).

Knott's Berry Farm in Buena Park, California, has a bottle house, made from over 3,000 whiskey bottles, that it uses as an "Indian Trader" store today. The house is a remake of the Rhyolite Bottle House replicated from photos taken by Walter Knott in the early 1950s.

The Washington Court Bottle House in Ohio was made with 9,963 bottles of all sizes and colors. The builder was a bottle collector and, to display his collection, he had them built into this house which was on display at Meyer's Modern Tourist Court. In Alexandria, Louisiana, there is a bottle-house gift shop that still stands today. The bottle house was constructed by Drew Bridges who used bottles from his drugstore. There are about 3,000 bottles used as masonry units with railroad ties used as the framing structure.

The Kaleva Bottle House in Kaleva, Michigan, was built by John J. Makinen, Sr.(1871-1942) using over 60,000 bottles laid on their sides with the bottoms toward the exterior. The bottles were mostly from his company, The Northwestern Bottling Works. The house was completed in 1941, but he passed away before he could move in. The building was purchased by the Kaleva Historical Museum in 1981 and is listed on the National Register of Historical Places. Boston Hills Pet Memorial Park in Boston, Massachusetts, has a bottle wall from 1942. It is part of a small building used for storage. The Wimberley Bottle House in Wimberley, Texas, was constructed using over 9,000 soda bottles. It was built in the early 1960s as part of a pioneer town, a simulated Old West town set to be a tourist attraction/theme park. The house was modeled after Knott's Berry Farm bottlehouse in California. [http://www.agilitynut.com/h/otherbh.html]

The Heineken WOBO (World Bottle)

As the story goes, Alfred Heineken had an epiphany while on a world tour of Heineken factories. When Heineken was on the Caribbean island of Curacao in 1960, he saw many bottles littering the beach because the island had no economic means of returning the bottles to the bottling plants from which they had come. He was also concerned with the lack of affordable building materials and the inadequate living conditions plaguing Curacao's lower-class. Envisioning a solution for these problems, he asked Dutch architect N. John Habraken to design what he called "a brick that holds beer."

Over the next three years, the Heineken WOBO went through a design process. Some of the early designs were of interlocking and self-aligning bottles. The idea sprang from the belief that the need for mortar would add complexity and expense to the bottle wall's intended simplicity and affordability. Some designs proved to be effective building materials, but too heavy and slow-forming to be economically produced. Other designs were rejected by Heineken based on aesthetic preferences. In the end, the bottle that was selected was a compromise between the previous designs.

The bottle was designed to be interlocking, laid horizontally and bonded with cement mortar with a silicon additive. A 10 ft x 10 ft shack would take approximately 1,000 bottles to build. In 1963, 100,000 WOBO's were produced in two sizes, 350 and 500 mm. This size difference was necessary in order to bond the bottles when building a wall, in the same way as a half brick is necessary when building with bricks. Unfortunately, most of them are destroyed and no bottles are left. They are very rare and became a collector's item.

Only two WOBO structures exist and they are both on the Heineken estate in Noordwijk, near Amsterdam. The first was a small shed which had a corrugated iron roof and timber supports where the builder could not work out how to resolve the junction between necks and bases running in the same direction. Later, a timber double garage was renovated with WOBO siding. Alfred Heineken did not develop the WOBO concept further and the idea never got a chance to materialize. Rinus van den Berg, a Dutch industrial & architectural designer, designed several buildings while working with John Habraken in the 1970's. One design was published in Domus, 1976.

References

* "Agilitynut". Mar 2000/Feb 2007. Seltzer, Debra Jane. Mar 2007 .
* "The Goat House". Georga Tech. Mar 2007 .

Books and publications

* Pawley, Martin. "Building for Tomorrow: Putting Waste to Work." San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982.
* [http://www.earthship.org/imagegaller/ "Earthship Biotecture" Earthship Biotecture. Mar 2007]
*Warmke, Annie & Jay. "Building a Vaulted Strawbale Building." Blue Rock Station Publishing, 2006

ee also

* Earthship
* Tin can wall
* Adobe
* Cob