BigShinyThing

In1960 on the Dutch island of Curacao in the West Indies, Alfred Heineken noticed that the native islanders suffered from a chronic housing shortage and a swelling tide of empty beer bottles. Returning and refilling the bottles, the usual practice in 1960, was not economical because Curacao was too far from the bottling plants back in Holland and Heineken had noticed the surplus of beer bottles when he visited the island as part of a world tour of his company’s distribution outlets. Suddenly, he realized that the beer bottle problem and the housing shortage were each other’s solution and decided to design a beer bottle that could be re-used as a housing brick.

Sadly, only 60,000 green-tinted WOBOs were cranked out, but to no one’s surprise the anemic “smart bottle” was a bust. The only thing ever built with it was a small shed with a corrugated iron roof, erected on the Heineken estate near Amsterdam. “Just a hut, really,” said designer John Habraken with a tinge of regret. “That was pretty much the end of it . . . I understood from the start that it was a long shot.”