Bottle wall
An alternative is to make the bottle wall from glass jugs filled with ink and set them up by supporting them between 2 windows.
When the bottles are filled with a (dark) liquid, or other dark material, the wall can function as a thermal mass, absorbing solar radiation during the day and radiating it back into the space at night, thus dampening diurnal temperature swings.
This was not done for aesthetic reasons, but to lighten the load of upper levels of structures, and also to reduce concrete usage.
The house was built using 10,000 bottles of J. Hostetter's Stomach Bitters which consisted of various herbs in a solution of 47% alcohol.
[citation needed] Around 1905, Tom Kelly built his house in Rhyolite, Nevada, using 51,000 beer bottles bonded with adobe.
He tried to make repairs to the house with concrete which, when mixed with the desert heat, caused many bottles to crack (Kelly had used adobe mud).
Another famous bottle house site was built by the self-taught senior citizen Tressa "Grandma " Prisbrey.
Beginning construction in 1956 at age 60, and working until 1981, Tressa "Grandma" Prisbrey transformed her 1/3 acre lot into Bottle Village, an otherworld of shrines, wishing wells, walkways, random constructions, plus 15 life size structures all made from found objects placed in mortar.
He was also concerned with the lack of affordable building materials and the inadequate living conditions plaguing Curaçao's lower-class.
Envisioning a solution for these problems, he asked Dutch architect N. John Habraken to design what he called "a brick that holds beer."
The idea derived from a belief that the need for mortar would add complexity and expense to the bottle wall's intended simplicity and affordability.
Some designs proved to be effective building materials, but too heavy and slow-forming to be economically produced.
The bottle was designed to be interlocking, laid horizontally and bonded with cement mortar with a silicon additive.
The necks were short and fitted into a large recess in the base, the bottles were square section with dimpled sides to bond with the mortar.
The first was a small shed which had a corrugated iron roof and timber supports where the builder could not work out how to resolve the junction between necks and bases running in the same direction.
Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew is a temple in Thailand that was built by monks out of bottles.
