StructureHub

Stumbling upon this beer (Busch, thank you) bottle house sure adds a bit of perspective to ongoing efforts at sustainable and adaptive-reuse design.  It was built in 1905 by a fellow named Tom Kelly in Ryolite, Nevada (for which a mining boom went bust and all life left in 1920).  Faced with the area’s scarcity of lumber, Kelly naturally turned to one of the few, cheap commodities in high supply in Western towns: 51,000 used beer bottles.

What about it, you say?  Well, its an apt reminder that reuse is nothing new; the reasons for doing it have just shifted to include environmental concerns.  Prior to the present-day press for sustainable design (pushed by a macro desire to save the planet and stem a broader lack of resources) there was sustainable design (propelled by the micro imperative of needing to live with a concrete scarcity of locally available/affordable resources).

Boston-based architecture firm Single Speed Studio’s Big Dig House is a high profile modern example - and one which was apparently so significant that it warranted a Paul Goldberger review (this despite being completed only recently).  But when you think about it, a closer modern analogy to the beer bottle house would be the many works of Auburn University’s Rural Studio (well-profiled in this documentary ) - and as far as finances are at issue, the work done through Architecture for Humanity.

Unlike glamour projects like the Big Dig House, which have the financing to pay for a building that tackles the macro - and arguably still somewhat abstract - issue of environmentalism, the Rural Studio puts up structures that regularly use castaway materials (car windshields and tires among them) because doing so is a practical necessity (not just an environmental dalliance).  Without the imaginative reuse of materials, which can drastic reduce the cost of construction, the impoverished folks in rural Alabama served by Samuel Mockbee’s legacy wouldn’t be able to afford to build anything in the first place.

It’s interesting to note that for desert-dwelling Mr. Kelly, the material cost would have been pretty low (if he bought it from, say, Minnesota); the transportation costs would be the deal killer.  Similarly, at some point in the future, transportation costs will again become an issue as petrol-based transporters deal with increasing oil prices, themselves driven by increasing scarcity.  At the same time, the material cost of certain building components (e.g., steel, concrete, certain species of wood) will also rise due to their increasing scarcity.  Full circle.

For some reason, the thought of the Big Dig House makes me think of Daniel Libeskind’s recent (some might say vain) interest in prefab design…

Image courtesy of Ken Lund