Tuesday, November 08, 2011

Plastic Bottlle House

I am always interested in different cheap and practical ways to build small houses. In fact even though I have never built a house in addition to my collection of bread cookbooks and other cookbooks I also have a quite a collection of building books. My  favourite is one which is more theoretical than practical (but I also have very practical books such as a book about electrical wiring and about plumbing) which is called something like "build like you care" or maybe "design like you care". I can't remember its title and I am trying to find it on the internet to give you the real title but so far I have not found it.

Added later::
I found it at amazon.com it is:
"Design like you give a damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises";
Author: Architecture for Humanity; (come on go check them out!)
Editors: Kate Stohr and Cameron Sinclair.

All this to say that I found an interesting article about a house built with plastic bottles filled with sand. The technique is not entirely new. I remember clearly that the book I mentioned as my favourite had at least one building built with bags full of dirt, but just the same I thought it was interesting.
My one concern about it would be that the base of the bottles exposed to the outside and so exposed to the sun will become brittle and break. This of course would release the sand they contain which in turn would mean that they loose their structural strength. I would worry about the life span a house like this. In any of those container-packed-with-dirt/sand techniques the life span of the container (bag or bottles or anything else) pretty much defines the life span of the house. Or at least this is the way I see it. However the article mentions that not only is a house like this a third of the price a house built with bricks and mortar but it is more "more durable". I just can't beleive it.

Photo from the BBC World  News article, link below
 You can see how the bottles are exposed to the elements.

This is an article in BBC World News (which yo must know by now is my preferred source of internet news when traveling. You can find it here.
Of course another interesting thing about this is the fact that this project should make it to international news.

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