'Beer Crate Pavillion, Brussels, Belgium' - New material for building with, Beer crates

'Beer Crate Pavillion, Brussels, Belgium' - New material for building with, Beer crates?

The beer crate pavilion of Brussels was designed and built in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1958 Universal World Exhibition. Beer crates were chosen for the project, in order to evoke the concepts of universality and reusability, and nothing did that better than an ordinary item from the daily life of an ordinary consumer.

An exercise in how a normal item can transcend its normal purpose and become architecture, the beer crate pavilion is made up of approximately 33,000 beer crates. It may seem like a tough structure to build, but designers actually said the chosen material made assembly easier and allowed them to explore engineer features like columns, arches and domes.