by Melissa Breyer
8. Build a Beer Bottle Bungalow
Seriously? Many handmade houses employ the copious use of empty beer cans and bottles in their walls, like the amazing one pictured here, built by Tito Ingenieri in Quilmes, Argentina. He used 6 million beer bottles, can you imagine? All that newly-produced structural material foregone, all those bottles put to fabulous reuse. So maybe you don’t have 6 million bottles to recycle, or, a house to build? This method can be translated to retaining walls, patio walls, or perhaps a beer-bottle dog house.
At Argentina beer-bottle house, let's hope builder wasn't drinking on the job
Mar 5, 2010 5:50 PM
Everyone's passed the time on an interminably long road trip crooning "99 Bottles of Beer." For the project Tito Ingenieri undertook in Quilmes, Argentina, the song comes up 5,999,901 bottles too short.
As you can see in the video (right), the industrious, ingenious Ingenieri spent 19 years building a home out of 6 million bottles of beer and other drinks and pieces of scrap iron he found on the streets of Quilmes or got from others. Ingenieri says his beer-bottle abode "actually belongs to the people of Quilmes, who helped by donating the bottles." Perhaps it's apt that Quilmes is a major brewer in Argentina.
Some people, according to Ingenieri, call the house green since so many bottles were taken off the streets in Quilmes, south of Buenos Aires. He also notes that the house acts as a weather vane since the wind whistling through the bottles' exposed necks alerts him to approaching storms.
The house is among the most unusual we've seen, but just think of all the bottle deposits Ingenieri passed up.
As you can see in the video (right), the industrious, ingenious Ingenieri spent 19 years building a home out of 6 million bottles of beer and other drinks and pieces of scrap iron he found on the streets of Quilmes or got from others. Ingenieri says his beer-bottle abode "actually belongs to the people of Quilmes, who helped by donating the bottles." Perhaps it's apt that Quilmes is a major brewer in Argentina.
Some people, according to Ingenieri, call the house green since so many bottles were taken off the streets in Quilmes, south of Buenos Aires. He also notes that the house acts as a weather vane since the wind whistling through the bottles' exposed necks alerts him to approaching storms.
The house is among the most unusual we've seen, but just think of all the bottle deposits Ingenieri passed up.
