by Joe Laur
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Author's Note: This is a followup story to my earlier post "One million Buddhist beers on the wall, one million Buddhist beers…" and continues the theme of building with bottles.

Ok, I've got a confession to make-I've emptied my share of beer, wine, cider and soda bottles in my time-the lion's share during 5 years of college. Maybe that's why it took 5 years to graduate. But I've toned it down to a bottle of local hard cider every week or two.

My passion for building, however, has grown with time. I've built a house, two cabins, a couple of woodsheds, outhouses and I'm currently working on a timber frame sugar house. My mother-in-law says I have an "edifice complex!"

So, the piece I posted last week on the "Buddhist Temple of A Million Beer Bottles" really struck a double chord with me, and I've investigated reusing bottles for building a little further, thanks to Wikipedia.

Bottle Wall Construction uses glass bottles mortared together with adobe, sand, cement, stucco, clay, plaster, mortar or any other compound to join them for a stained glass effect wall. Jars, jugs and other glass containers can be put to use as well. Seems to be limited only by the imagination.

The effect is very interesting, letting light play through the bottles. This type of wall can act as a heat sink, storing sunlight during the day and releasing the warmth later on. Using dark bottles or filling them with dark materials (careful of freezing temperatures-they'll break) adds to the heat capture.

This is not a new phenomenon, however. It turns out that bottles used in building dates back at least to the Romans. The bottles saved concrete and lightened the weight of upper walls. This technique was used for example in the Circus of Maxentius, a popular tourist trap in its day.

According to Wikipedia, the first bottle house in the US 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 (And I thought my college brews were strong!).veve In a move of historical and ecological shortsightedness, The Peck house was demolished in the early 1980's. Maybe Tonopah, Nevada needed more parking.

Around 1905, a fellow named Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, (What is it with bottle houses in Nevada?) using 51,000 beer bottles mortared together with adobe.

Because trees were scarce in the desert, bottles were a practical choice. Most of them were Busch beer bottles collected from the 50 bars in this Gold Rush town. Rhyolite became a ghost town. But in 1925, the Bottle House was rediscovered by Paramount and used in a movie. It later became a museum, and a private residence.

Of all places, Knott's Berry Farm has it's own bottle house in use as a store today.

Another famous bottle house was built by a self taught senior citizen named Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey, in Simi Valley California. Bottle Village is on The National Register of Historic Places and considered a major artistic achievement. Beginning construction in 1956 at age 60, and working until 1981, at age 85, "Grandma" Prisbrey transformed her 1/3 acre lot into Bottle Village, a recycled world of shrines, wishing wells, walkways, random constructions, and 15 life size structures all made from found objects placed in mortar.

"Bottle Village" is made of tens of thousands of bottles unearthed via daily visits by Grandma to the dump.

Then there's The Washington Court Bottle House in Ohio (made of 9,963 bottles of all sizes and colors), a bottle-house gift shop that still stands today in Alexandria, Louisiana, the Kaleva Bottle House in Kaleva, Michigan (made with over 60,000 bottles from The Northwestern Bottling Works), and The Wimberley Bottle House in Wimberley, Texas, constructed from 9,000 soda bottles.

We wrote earlier about the Heineken bottle bricks and the Buddhist Temple of Beer bottles. One last bottle house deserves mention, if only because it uses plastic 2-liter soda bottles-a sign of modern times.

In 2008, Jay and Annie Warmke built a plastic bottle greenhouse out of roughly 1,500 two-liter soda bottles. The greenhouse sits on a rammed-earth tire foundation with the north wall constructed of sewn straw bales and two-55 gallon rain barrels. The greenhouse faces due south and helps to extend the growing season for Blue Rock Station, a sustainable living center in Ohio. Worth the pilgrimage, and you can download instructions from their website and build your own with all those designer water bottles you’ve been loathe to throw away.