I had decided from the very beginning of building my new studio that I wanted to include a bottle wall in some aspect of it. I had spent time in buildings in Haiti where bottle walls were used in construction and I’ve always love the look and of course the repurposing aspect of it. Here in Baja, it’s very hard to recycle colored glass, so I wanted to make use of these bottles. The back of our studio faces our road and a neighbors house, so I didn’t want to have big windows on that side but it’s also the side that the sun comes up on, so we designed high long windows for airflow and light while maintaining privacy. Two of those four long windows are going to become bottle windows. I’ve been collecting and had friends collecting green bottles for me for months now. Thought I’d share the process of making the ‘bricks’.
So far I’ve cut about 60 bottles with a tile saw and made 30 bricks that are the same depth as the window opening. I take two cut off bottoms and duct tape them together to create each brick. I just collected another 40 bottles so those are still awaiting processing. I’m estimating that I’ll need about 70 bricks per window. Once I have enough bricks, they will be mortared in place in the window and the ends will be cleaned off to allow the light to shine through. I’ve taped out the size of the window on the floor so I can get an idea of the spacing, the layout of shapes and colors and how many bottles I’ll actually need. It will be a while before this project is finished but it’s been really fun to work on step by step. I’m very excited to eventually see the sun shining through them and casting the colors around the studio. I will definitely share more pics of this project as it progresses.