The Heineken World Brick

It’s a great idea that never got beyond a run of about 100,000–Heineken’s “World Bottle”–a beer bottle that doubles as a building material. It was a collaboration between Alfred Heineken and Dutch architect John Habraken back in the early 1960s. The story goes that the idea came when Heineken saw tons of his own beer bottles washed up on a Caribbean beach that also lacked affordable building materials.

It would be great to see more reusable packaging like this. And you could drink your way into a house.

Thanks to Larry Santoyo for mentioning this cool idea in a lecture.

Leave a comment

8 Comments

  1. I’ve always appreciated the way nutella and some other products in Europe are packaged in glass containers designed to immediately be reused as drinking glasses and they come with a handy pop on lid for storing small amounts of things. I wish more products would do that…

  2. People made houses out of cement and bottles in Nevada during pioneer days. There are still a few bottle houses around to this day.

Comments are closed.