glass bottle house

You would have to multiple the “ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall” from the old tune by six hundred thousand to make this whole glass home. It took one artistic builder nearly two decades to complete this eclectic project, constructing it piece by piece – as much a never-ending work of sculpture or do-it-yourself scrap-pile as a house.

Continue reading below
Our Featured Videos
glass bottle recycled materials

Some of the wall work is structural but much is decorative . There is no clean line between function and decor, as a sturdy and solid glass, mud and cement surface gives way to towers, ornaments and abstracted gargoyles that dot almost the entire property.

glass bottle house with bicycles junk

It is not just the recycled bottles: hub caps, old bicycles and other metal, plastic and glass odds and ends have likewise become entangled in this weaved web of recycled wonders.

glass bottle recycled house details

Of course, while he did most of the building on his own, it ‘takes a village’ to raise something on the scale of this amazing recycled home. Buenos Aires artist Tito Ingenieri relied on friends, families and neighbors to save and send him their used bottles – a process that became as second-nature as setting out the trash over the years of construction. As a strange sort of thank you gift back to the region: when the south winds blow the home sounds the alarm through whistling glass walls, alerting residents and locals to a higher-than-average flood potential.

Here’s some more info via Spaces:

“This project, which he began around 1992, is not his first unusual living arrangement: for some fifteen years he previously lived in a treehouse whose access stairs curled around the tree trunk. An inveterate collector and inventor, he says he is a náufrago del tiempo – a castaway from time – utilizing the physical castoffs of our post-industrial society to build his wonders. Except for the concrete mortar, all of the materials used in his constructions are recycled. This includes not only glass bottles of all sizes, shapes, and colors, but also found objects of metal, ceramics, stone, and more. In contrast to other bottle houses, which have tended to follow the standard formal parameters for building construction, Ingenieri’s structure includes walls protruding at geometric angles, their cantilevered surfaces emphasized by the necks of the bottles extending out from the exterior surfaces. The idiosyncrasy of the shape of the façade is primarily due to its metal armature, recycled steel that Ingenieri has welded into asymmetrical shapes, worked around and incorporating such found objects as port-hole windows and huge wagon wheels.”