A brick that was once a beer...
Heineken and the "green" architecture
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Image via pauladglover.com
The concept of sustainability in architecture has been discussed increasingly as critical to current and future generations. This issue is crucial to the development of what could be called a smart, sustainable architecture, which determines that a building should be designed according to its natural surrounding elements. The form of architectural space is inherent to environmental needs.
This article is about the unlikely relationship between architecture, a bottle of beer and sustainability concerns!
The glass bottle is one of the most used objects in the current consumer society, whose recycling is now a common practice worldwide.
What is surprising is the concept created by Heineken so that it could be recycled to be reused directly in construction. Yes, the company of Dutch beer, during the first half of the twentieth century created a "glass brick", an element that would revolutionize the way people see a bottle.
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Alfred Heineken created the bottle "Wobo" (name given to the product), which in addition to serving the community address the issue of recycling in deprived areas. In this deprived areas the reuse of the bottle to its original function would be very difficult or even impossible, however, this object could be reused as a glass brick in the construction of buildings, simple, fast and very economically.
The bottle went through several stages of prototypes, always formally very similar to a traditional brick and was developed in two sizes, one with 35cm and another 50cm.
Unfortunately this project was not very successful and today no one knows for sure how many bottles still exist. The Heineken museum in Amsterdam is one of the few places where you can still envision this building system.
To finish this article, we leave a likely revival of this product, a prototype not in the market. This reinterpretation is supposedly designed by Petit Romain (French designer), establishing a new way of drinking beer, easy to fix and which will probably be simpler to build.
Image via heineken.com
