Message In Bottle

A message in a bottle

In 1963, Alfred Heineken had the idea of designing a beer bottle, which could be used as brick once the contents had gone. The idea came from a visit to the Caribbean where he was struck by the litter from thousands of discarded beer bottles, by the lack of easily available building materials and by the poor quality of housing in the area.

The 1960’s was a time before the environmental movement became mainstream so this could be considered one of the first serious attempts at up scaling or recycling.  The Dutch Architect John Habraken was commissioned to design the bottle and came up with a form with dimpled sides and a deep base so that the spout could be placed into the end of the bottle, effectively interlocking it.

Alfred Heineken pushed the idea hard and authorized the production of two sizes of bottle that were to be bonded together as walls with a cement mortar Despite his enthusiasm only two structures are known to have been built, a shed and a wall. The reluctance of the Heineken factory to change its production line and fears over the strength of the bottle walls meant that the idea died a death. The inspirational idea of using a common commodity from an industry unrelated to construction in a building lives on though in a world wide, albeit small scale, movement to build from ordinary round bottles and plastic bottles filled with earth.

Taking the idea of upscaling further we now have the fad for building with shipping containers and Shigeru Ban has built several structures from cardboard. Buildings have even been proposed with Volkswagen bus roofs, oil cansand old car tyres. Whilst an obvious way of recycling old beer bottles would be to make them into more beer bottles it does raise a question of creative re-use in appropriate contexts and maybe we should be more open to the use of (very) alternative materials.

Message in a bottle: Language learning: two languages, two experiences

In my long journey as a language learner I've understood a couple of things; I've experienced it as a student, but also studied it. I started studying English when I was quite young (10 years old), and my teacher was Italian. With German, things were different. I started to study it when I was at University (20 years old), my teachers were mainly mother-tongue. These differences made me think about how I apprehended these two languages. English at the beginning was totally a matter of fun! our teacher showed us cartoons, and then taught us some words and phrases. I can't remember any writing exercise during the first year. We learnt to say something and mainly how to use those phrases. Nothing about grammar or how to build up sentences. Then time for grammar came: present simple, Subject Verb Object structure, and so on... but only later. What we learnt first of all were Formulae. It was not important to learn the rule, but how to say things, because we need to spend time talking, somehow. The first time my teacher came in class I was so scared! She started talking in German, only very few of us could understand what she was saying; I remember I thought something like: "How am I going to learn anything about it if she's not going to stop and explain us what she's saying?!" I was wrong; what they were trying to do was a total immersion in the language and also they tried to make us used with the sensation of not understanding each and every words they say. I'm a language student, I've started to write in this blog for my last English course at the University, but I enjoyed it so much that I decided to keep on blogging, I find it very useful to improve, train and update my language learning! I study German too, and I'm interested in language learning in general! Do you have any advice? Please, leave a comment!

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