Home Upfront Now Up Books Towns Structures People Firms Lexicon		Bottle walls - De Waal's cottage, Twin Rivers, Doornkloof : architrix _____________________________________________________ Author: Wegelin, Hans In: South African architect Vol 17, Issue 2, Jan-feb Date: 2001 Pages: 48 _____________________________________________________
It will take you about a year of drinking a bottle of wine or cider a day to build the outdoor shower or screen shown here. If you start building as you are consuming the contents of the bottles you might come up with even more wonderful ideas. And should you struggle with your structure and become disheartened, you can always stagger down the road to discard the empty bottles in the recycle bin, convincing yourself that its embodied energy was better directed to recycling than to be used as an alternative for clay bricks. The shower structure rests entirely on a sober soldier course of slim white Savannah Cider bottles, three of them fitting nicely side-by-side with their heads through the holes of a standard brick (the pressure of the completed structure on each bottle is about 20 kg). Then follows a chastily solid barrel of bricks-on-edge, topped with two soldier courses of heady Versus crisp white in, what else, a bottle green colour. The fatter Versus soldiers fit with their heads in the two outer holes of a brick, and alternate with an upside-down soldier with its head in the centre hole. The holes are filled solid around the soldier necks with mortar—their mouths capped or covered with newspaper to prevent mortar dropping in the bottle or filling up with rainwater. The screen wall has piers of bricks-on-edge with stretcher Versus bottles in between, their necks sticking through the holes and into the kick-up* of the neighbouring bottle. The direction of the necks alternate to balance lateral forces while laying. Designer-builders: Roger FISHER and Solomon Bhuda *In the early days of bottle-making the pontil (metal rod on which the bottle was attached by its base as support while shaping) was snapped off the base when the bottle was completed, leaving a scar of rough glass. To prevent the bottle from wobbling on this scar, a hump was formed by depressing the base with the pontil, leaving what was known as a kick-up. (E Lastovica. 1982. Bottles and Bygones. Don Nelson. Cape Town. 104p) (It is presumed that today, although bottles are made mechanically, the kick-up has been retained as a trap for sediment)