A man, a plan, a walland several tons of wine bottles. "Green" building comes to the backyard. By David A.

Fryxell / Photos by Lisa D. Fryxell

First, let me say this to all the people who've been bringing us empty wine bottles: Thank you very much. And now PLEASE STOP! The wine bottles went inside a wall we were having built in our backyardthink of them as filler of a sort. Happily for us, our wall-building began about the same time that the Southwest Solid Waste Authority in Silver City ceased recycling glass as not cost-effective. So suddenly ecologically-minded wine drinkers all over town were eager to bring us bottles that otherwise would have simply gone into the trash. Between three similar outside-wall projects built this winter and spring by Doug Lacy (see main story), some 30 tons of glass were kept out of the landfill. Our comparatively modest 42-foot project consumed only a fraction of that; about 25 tons of bottles went into a massive, 140-feet-long, seven-and-a-half-feet-high wall that Lacy erected about the same time as ours. The influx of wine bottles continued for a few weeks after our wall was finished, howeversometimes left stealthily in our backyard by anonymous imbibing environmentalists. Evidently we weren't alone: "Everybody started bringing me wine bottles," says Lacy. "Hey, I'm just a guy with a cool building idea who's been able to show a viable way to use recyclable materials. Glass is a valuable thing." The wine-bottle-filled wall in progress. Lacy's wall-building process starts with shaping the structure out of remesh wire, sometimes called "concrete steel." He's got a special machine that folds this welded wire into six- or 12-inch basket forms. The baskets are then used like building blocks to construct the basic skeleton of the wall. Next, in our case, came the wine bottles. Lacy explains that he could have used any of a variety of possible materials as filler inside the remesh baskets, but of course glass bottles were a timely solution. "The bottles enhance the strength by adding more weightin this case, a great deal more weight," he says, adding that for strictly outside construction it would also be

okay to leave the walls hollow. For home construction, however, he'd fill the remesh with pumped-in cellular concrete. We did our best to keep up with Lacy's construction team, obtaining bottles to fill the walls as they took shape. Pretty soon, Shevek & Mi and Diane's restaurants and the Twisted Vine wine bar were saving empty bottles for us, and the word went out via email to bring us your bottles, your empties, your huddled masses yearning to be recycled. We did our part, too, of course, soldiering our way through one wine bottle after another, heedless of the risk to our livers. (It's a tough job, but somebody had to do it.) The only hitch in a large-scale application of this technique, Lacy adds, is the manual labor required to get the bottles to the wall. He envisions inventing a conveyor that could ferry recyclable materials right to a workman on the wall. Once the bottles were in place, a shiny layer of metal lath reinforcement went over the top of the glass-filled baskets. Then the whole thing was covered in a high-strength, fiber-reinforced cement shell. By using very little water with the cement and ultra-fine micron-three fly ash, Lacy explains, the resulting cement is less porous and stronger. He likens the whole creation to the stress skin of an airplane wing. Finally, after much debate about color, the finished wall was painted and we added the gate. Now that our wall is done, what happens to all those wine bottles (not to mention other recyclable glass)? No, don't dump them on Lacy's doorstep. A local Recycling Advisory Committee is working with the solid waste authority to try to find economical glass-recycling solutions. Other possible alternatives include using crushed glass as a base for sidewalks and slabs and buying a glass crusher that can pulverize glass to particles as fine as sand that could be used for various commercial applications. For more information, call Ann Alexander at 5349022 or Terry Timme at 534-4389 or email diannaterry@Juno.com.

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Desert Exposure

Website: http://www.scribd.com/doc/51432781/Gramdma-Prisbrey-s-Bottle-Village-a-Thesis

3.2.1. Form & Design Glass bottle wall exhibits two types of construction, unreinforced load bearing bottlemasonry. The design included glass bottle masonry wall. Whenviewed from the interior, a certain element of colored light conjures a unique and individual experience. 3.2.2. Materials Materials lend color, texture, durability and character to a structure. Glass bottle have collected to install as a wall material or art object. T hese objects have been taken into a new and complex matrix. In a glass bottle wall, container glass is redefinedas a structural building material, the masonry unit, while cement mortar remains in itshistorical use as the bonding agent. The found objects may be admired individually, aswell as a collective whole. Each object was hand-picked by the artist, entailing a cursoryvisual assessment of condition, potential use.

Bottle wall
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July
2011)

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

Contents
[hide]

1 Bottle Wall Construction 2 Construction o 2.1 Construction materials o 2.2 Heat sink 3 Binding Mixtures 4 Bottle Houses Throughout History o 4.1 The Heineken WOBO (World Bottle) 5 See also 6 References 7 Books and publications

[edit] 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 ink and set them up by supporting them between 2 windows. [1]

[edit] Construction
[edit] Construction materials

Bottle walls may be made from recycled mason jars, such as this jam jar Although bottle walls can be constructed in many different ways, they 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.

[edit] Heat sink

When the bottles are filled with a (dark) liquid, or other dark material, the wall can function as a thermal mass, absorbing solar radiation during the day and radiating it back into the space at night, thus dampening diurnal temperature swings.

[edit] 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.

[edit] Bottle Houses Throughout History

a Bottle Wall of an Earthship Bathroom

the exterior bottle walls of 2 earthships

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 19361954, 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. Another famous bottle house site was built by the self taught senior citizen Tressa "Grandma " Prisbrey. Located in Simi Valley California, Bottle Village is lauded by art scholars, The State of California, The National Register of Historic Places and in exhibitions, as a major artistic achievement. Beginning construction in 1956 at age 60, and working until 1981, Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey transformed her 1/3 acre lot into Bottle Village, an otherworld of shrines, wishing wells, walkways, random constructions, plus 15 life size structures all made from found objects placed in mortar. The name "Bottle Village" comes from the structures themselves made of tens of thousands of bottles unearthed via daily visits to the dump. 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 died 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.[1]

[edit] The Heineken WOBO (World Bottle)

This section does not cite any references or sources. Please help improve this section by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (November 2008) 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 Curaao 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 Curaao'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 derived from a 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 (3.0 m) x 10 ft (3.0 m) 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[citation needed] 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 1970s. One design was published in Domus, 1976.

[edit] See also

Earthship Tin can wall

Adobe Cob

[edit] References
1. ^ Building a bottle wall

Agilitynut. Mar 2000/Feb 2007. Seltzer, Debra Jane. Mar 2007 <http://www.agilitynut.com/h/otherbh.html>. The Goat House. Georga Tech. Mar 2007 <http://maven.gtri.gatech.edu/sfi/gradcourses/goathouse/MBWall.html>.

[edit] Books and publications

Pawley, Martin. Building for Tomorrow: Putting Waste to Work. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982. Earthship Biotecture Earthship Biotecture. Mar 2007 Warmke, Annie & Jay. "Building a Vaulted Strawbale Building." Blue Rock Station Publishing, 2006 Warmke, Annie & Jay. "Building a Plastic Bottle Greenhouse." Blue Rock Station Publishing, 2008

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bottle_wall