Bottle Sail

The 16 square metre nursery house supports a farming community of people living with HIV in a coastal district. The Vietnamese design team aimed for something simple, effective and sustainable: a place to raise seedlings, a rest stop for farmers working the fields and a meeting point for farmers, pupils and students.

To keep cost and time low and make the house easy to rebuild elsewhere, it uses recycled materials and local labour. Broken concrete pipes form the foundation for a bamboo frame, and a wall of plastic bottles shields seedlings from the summer sun while keeping them warm in winter. The whole house cost about 400 dollars.

Its form recalls a full sail on the sea nearby, and the bottles shimmer differently through the day across the open field. Some 3,000 bottles were collected by community members and local students from industrial zones and beaches, and taking part in the build was itself a step toward reintegration.