With the excuse of building a house (we have our studio there) we developed tiles made of 8 litre tomato cans that are usually thrown into the garbage.
Together with a blacksmith friend, we developed a simple folding machine. Then we bought hundreds of cans from the Bariloche Recycling Association which works classifying materials in the local dump. We hired a worker who washed, opened, and bent the cans with the machine.
Finally we nailed the tiles to a wood structure. In this way, we obtained an economical way of covering walls, resistant to winds and rain and estheticaly reasonable. We say now that we have a “South American Guggenheim”.
For this house, we also made glass bricks with whisky bottles (cut in half and then stuck together). In this way, we obtained inexpensive bricks that can compete with industrial ones. They are simple to make, and very insulating.
This project has been published at the Discovery’s web-page: treehugger.com , at INHABITAT (http://www.inhabitat.com/) and in the German magazine BauMetall 2-2010 (www.baumetall.de)
