Image credit: Barak Brinker

ZeroHome, a project by the Tel Aviv-based studio Geotectura, is a house built entirely from waste – but you wouldn’t necessarily suspect it from looking at its sharp, angular form.

Submitted to our Money-themed open call for "Architectural Survival" projects, ZeroHome well-encapsulates the type of projects we're looking for: thrifty yet imaginative. It’s off the grid, meaning unconnected to sewage, electricity, water, and gas. Yet the designers claim it still meets “all existential needs” in the project text, reprinted below.

ZeroHome is great evidence that you don’t need a lot of cash to make a beautiful structure – even a home. Perhaps more importantly, the results tend to be dramatically more ecologically-friendly than your average home.

Geotectura describes ZeroHome:

ZeroHome was designed by Geotectura with the power of the community to build a house from waste only that looks on one side as a regular house and on the other side it has the same shape but upside down to show the evolution we need to create in how we should build.

ZeroHome was designed by Geotectura with the power of the communityIn ZeroHome we present a life built of all that which works well: breathing deeply, eating fresh food, spending time with people, lovingly sharing, exchanging information, being connected to a community, returning our “waste” to the earth. All these simple things are somehow perceived as unattainable in our culture – “who has the time?”

The house gives us this time, connects us to our most basic of needs and asks: Are we getting enough sleep? Is the air we’re breathing nurturing us? Is the water we’re drinking the best for us? Is the food we’re eating healthy? Where do our excretions go? ZeroHome has answers, however its main objective is setting the questions in the collective consciousness.Where do our food remaining disappear to? Do we love enough? Where did our childhood dreams go?

ZeroHome has answers, however its main objective is setting the questions in the collective consciousness. Those who will step inside, abandoning for a few moments the cellophane wrapper of our culture, will be invited to acknowledge the unsustainable nature of the western culture dream of “progress”, and to connect with a dream well-hidden: that of a sustainable, beautiful and human world.

At the Physical Level the house is disconnected from the infrastructural grid: sewage, electricity, water and gas (“the grid”), while still meeting all existential needs: water, food, appropriate conditions for sleep, hosting, work and rest, and recycling secretions and leftovers, showing that we can live comfortably, without damaging the environment - we might even do some good!

"ZeroHome" by Geotectura was selected from an open call for submissions to be featured as part of Money, our theme for March 2016.