United Bottle

The Zürich based architecture office INSTANT (Dirk Hebel & Jörg Stollmann with Tobias Klauser) has designed a water bottle that can be recycled and filled with local soil and stacked to form temporary shelter. The concept, called UNITED_BOTTLE can be used by Governments and NGOs to distribute water locally and regionally and be able to upcycle the bottle as a building material in combination with found materials such as sand, earth and natural insulation materials such as animal hair. The simple water bottle would operate as a container for the awareness of the next crisis.

Quake Safe

quake-safe.jpg

Quake Safe is a frame made from string, bamboo and wire, which can be either retrofitted into an existing adobe (mud brick) house or incorporated into a new house as it’s being built, in order to give it a much higher level of structural protection against earthquakes. The invention was created by Faculty of Engineering Ph.D Student at the University of Technology in Sydney, Dominic Dowling.

The frame is designed to be affordable to people who live in adobe houses, particularly the poorer rural communities of Central America.

[ interview | video ]