I've always been fascinated with reusing bottles as dividers, walls or lamps because they can create such a luminous glow AND because they are just a great, cheap tactile material. Lately, I've been noticing a lot of lovely wall uses and a post that Regina wrote for our new guy mini-site that highlighted beer bottle walls was a huge hit. So, for today, I gathered up her post, a few others and my collected pics of walls that I've seen recently. Enjoy!
>> AVEC Restaurant in Chicago: I LOVE this place. The interior is woody with this tall green glass bottle wall at the back (I do believe that the lights behind it have become fewer over the years).
>> City Winery in NYC: This great new bar and music spot on the side of SoHo features this low tech bottle wall in their downstairs. Not sure that having them standing up is as pretty as when they are on their side and denser.
>> Inspiration: Beer Bottle Partitions: Architecture firm, Johnsen Schmaling Architects, found unopened beer bottles in the basement of the brewery and turned them into 9’-6” wide by 9’-0” tall partitions.
>> 99 Bottles of Beer Post: These are five stylish beer bottle reuse projects you can implement at home as well a few other inspired glass uses
>> Look!: A Rainbow Bottle Wall: "This wall is the reason we first visited Nick's Uptown." via Chicago
>> Building With Beer: New Image, Old Idea: Images of the new Heineken City interior and what Alfred Heineken and architect John Habraken tried to do in 1963...
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This is one of my favorite posts! I wonder how you could DIY after saving bottles needed.....
That rainbow wall reminds me of Radiohead's Fake Plastic Trees video.
I like those bottle walls, too. I was once in a late 19th century house built mostly of rounded river stones set in horizontal layers of cement, but stuck in among the rocks, apparently at random, were dozens of old glass bottles--the kind that quack medicines & patent elixirs might have come in--and the dim greenish light they emitted gave the place an cool, otherwordly effect that felt distinctly modern, even though that probably wasn't the intent. The 195Os Modernist church fashion for abstract panes of stained glass set dirrectly into concrete walls (instead of in traditional wood or metal frames) creates the same sort of effect, but without the naive charm.
And who could resist that mesmerizing back wall of glowing, colored liquids at Nick's Uptown? Certainly, not me. Having a friendly bar in the neighborhood is good, but having one with a cool art installation is even better, so maybe I'll stop in on my way home tonight. Thanks for the reminder.
In the hills west of Cheyenne is a 1930-ish house made of embalming fluid bottles, constructed by a mortician that ran a mortuary between WWI and WWII. The rectangular-section bottles lie on their sides in a concrete matrix; the caps/bottoms alternate in each course. When lit from within the effect was magical - I didn't ever go in as a kid as it was sort of spooky - but I suspect the sunlight streaming through all that glass was fairly spectacular, too.
All they did for the colored bottles at Nick's uptown is fill them with colored liquid, food coloring would work. Just make sure the bottles are closed tightly..then they put them against a lit wall... Love it!