uthor Paul Collins once saw Tom Kelly’s house many years ago. It was built of 51,000 beer bottles in the year 1901. Collins recounted, “Dipsomania is a boon for such builders: a similar honeycomb-like structure of bottles and mortar, built by a pharmacist in Hillsville, Virginia in the 1940s, was nicknamed The House of a Thousand Headaches for all the hangovers it held.” That made me laugh. So yeah, people build stuff out of bottles, that we know, but few know of one particularly laudable endeavor undertaken by Heineken Breweries: the WOBO (World Bottle).

It has been exactly half a decade since its epiphanic inception, an idea that was mass-produced three years after Alfred Heineken walked the beaches of Curaçao in 1960. Bottles had accumulated in the sand as ineffectual discards, many of which were produced by Heineken. The island had no economic means of recycling nor returning the bottles to their makers. In Holland, the average bottle was used 30 times before being discarded. In Curaçao, bottles were used once and thrown out.

As the story goes, there usually exists a lack of affordable housing in lower-class societies. Alfred, the compassionate chairman, envisioned a solution to the problem and asked Dutch architect John Habraken to design the WOBO, a “brick that holds beer.” Martin Pawley noted in his book Garbage Housing that the WOBO was “the first mass production container ever designed from the outset for secondary use as a building component.”

The WOBO’s interlocking design was three years in the making, made to work like brick and mortar construction. Habraken explained that one of the construction challenges “was to find a way in which corners and openings could be made without cutting bottles.” A test run of 100,000 WOBOs were produced in 1963 in two sizes (500 & 350 mm) with the smaller bottle acting similarly to a half brick. A thousand bottles bonded with cement mortar could build a 10″ x 10″ shack, and construction would be simple because the instructions could be printed right on the beer label.

In 1965, a prototype glass shed (above) was built near Alfred Heineken’s villa in in Noordwijk, Netherlands. Sadly, it is the first and only WOBO house in existence. The WOBO did not impress the company’s marketing department and the whole thing eventually fell to the wayside. How could Heineken market itself as a premium beer if it would end up lining the walls of a poor person’s home? Other questions soon followed: What if a bottle fell loose and hit a passerby, or worse yet, an entire bottle house collapsed? Who would be responsible? Perhaps Mr. Heineken was too ahead of his time, however, the WOBO still remains an amazing example of forward thinking in utilitarian and humanitarian design.

Sources: Wikipedia; Cabinet; & Inhabitat