By Lloyd Alter, Source: Inhabitat

Forget Zaha and the Design of the Year Awards. The annual Shed of the Year competition honours people who build incredible things with their own hands and their own money. There are dozens of entries in categories ranging from pub sheds to Tardis sheds but being TreeHugger, we concentrate on the eco sheds. This year there are some interesting new entries in the category, but one does stand out.

Richard Pim’s Bottle Dome is a truly remarkable structure and my first thought was that if this doesn’t win, then there is no justice in the world.

My shed is a dome made with about 5000 glass bottles set between crossed arches – like a huge hot-cross bun. Some part of the glass hemisphere directly faces the sun at all times of the day, giving an extraordinary sparkle which is reflected in an interior pool. It has a bench inside and is quite big (3.1 m from floor to the inside ceiling and 5.0 m in width). It is a feature for my garden.

I made every part of the dome myself – and emptied a good few of the bottles! The arches and the door frames are made of reinforced concrete for strength. … The bottles were mortared into the four quadrants between the arches with the necks of the bottles always pointing to the centre of the building. In that way the sunlight comes directly down the bottles.

Read the rest at: Inhabitat