Empty plastic bottles are so light they can be blown away by even a gentle wind. It's hard to imagine that this insubstantial throwaway material can really be used to put up a building that will stand up to the elements over a long period of time. The first architect in the world to take on this challenge is a 33-year-old man from Taiwan with degrees in architecture from Cornell University (undergraduate) and Harvard (graduate) named Arthur Huang. Charged with designing the Pavilion of New Fashion for the 2010 Taipei Flora Expo, it was quite by accident that he, along with his research team, discovered their amazing new application for trashed PET bottles.

LED lights have been fitted into many of the polli-bricks that make up the exterior wall of the EcoARK, and when they are lit up at night the building looks like a sparkling diamond. It is acknowledged to be one of the pavilions at this year's Taipei Flora Expo that is likely to arouse the greatest curiosity in visitors.

Few ordinary people in Taiwan have ever heard of Huang's company MINIWIZ Sustainable Energy Development, but green energy planners and designers around the world certainly have. Products that have been put out by his firm-including the HYmini hand-held wind power generator, the miniSOLAR portable solar power panel, the SolarBulb solar-powered LED lamp, and the Biologic -ReeCHARGE micro-generator and power storage system (relying mainly on pedal -power, developed in cooperation with the well-known international bicycle maker Dahon)-have also drawn plenty of attention. Huang has not only won numerous awards, such as a 2009 Eurobike iF design award from Germany, he and his works have been the subject of reports by CNN, the BBC, Time Magazine, and other global media.

The idea for the building material for the EcoARC, so explosive in its impact, actually came from Huang's simple yet thoughtful observation of his surroundings. Three years ago, while he and his research team were wondering what materials they could use for the Pavilion of New Fashion, Huang noticed that he and almost all his office colleagues almost constantly had bottled drinks in their hands. This observation inspired him to think that the solution to their problem could perhaps start with these objects that are, on a daily basis, the source of mountains of trash.

At that time, as he played with a bottle in his hands, he suddenly thought: An empty bottle is really structurally weak, but could it be that if lots of them were linked together, there would be "strength in numbers"? He then began to explore structural patterns from nature and his life experience as he waited for the light bulb to go off over his head. After a few unsatisfac-tory attempts, he successfully created a bottle-brick in the shape of a hexagon, about 30 centimeters long and about 17-18 cm across, with the sides alternately convex or concave so they can be interlocked into large, stable forms. And the inspirations? Beehives and Lego toys!

The Far Eastern EcoARK not only has walls made from PET bottles, the lighting inside also uses polli-bricks assembled into various creative configurations.

The manufacturing process for these "polli-bricks," as they are dubbed, follows along the same lines as that for fibers: After bottles brought in for recycling have been sorted by color, washed, shattered, melted at high temperatures, and so on, the PET pellets can be formed into the specific shapes required for the bricks.

Especially noteworthy is that the PET bottles used to make polli-bricks do not have to meet the same rigorous standards of cleanliness and purity as do those remanufactured into clothing fibers or beverage containers. This means that the remanufacturing process takes far less time and water. In other words, these bricks set new standards for how little carbon is emitted in the remanufacturing process, yet are enormously cost-efficient. Is it any wonder that they outpaced numerous competitors to win a design prize at the 2010 Earth Awards (which confer global recognition for achievements in the green energy industry)?

As Huang explains, contemporary design concepts for green architecture aim at buildings that are able to keep out exterior heat, maintain internal temperatures at suitable comfort levels, admit light, and reduce the future demand for electricity used to power air conditioning and lighting, and moreover are made of materials that are light and recyclable. Polli-brick buildings fit these criteria to a T.

For the EcoARK, Huang wanted his bottle-bricks left empty-i.e. with only air inside. It is no coincidence that air happens to be nature's own best non-toxic insulator and that its translucence reduces demand for interior lighting. The empty bottles can of course be modified to meet the different needs of different buildings and serve multiple functions. For example, the bottles can be filled with water to make them more soundproof, or filled with sand so they can take more weight. For the company's design for remote guard posts in Xi'an in mainland China's Shaanxi Province, they filled the polli-bricks with sand to make them more wind-resistant and to fit in as closely as possible to the scenery of this region of China.

There are protrusions and intrusions on the surfaces of each and every hexagonal polli-brick so that they will snap together firmly into a solid whole without toxic industrial glue.

There are many other advantages to polli-bricks as well. They are lighter than wood, glass, or steel, so shipping and installation are easier; when they are assembled, there is no need for highly toxic industrial glue; and they are 100% recyclable. It is claimed that no green building material better fits into the contemporary conservationist ideal of "from the cradle to the cradle."

One problem to overcome was that the flat surface of a plastic bottle just wouldn't be hard enough to deal with the forces of nature on the scale of a building. It turns out that the protruding and intruding shapes on the bricks not only allow them to be interlocked, they also strengthen the surfaces. Drawing on ideas from origami (paper folding), Huang designed the bricks to have angular protrusions alternating with corresponding intrusions. Just as a handful of chopsticks cannot be broken as easily as any one of the chopsticks alone, assembled polli-bricks can tolerate 400 kilograms of impact force per square meter, can resist winds 1.5 times as strong as those of Typhoon Nari (whose wind speeds reached 24.7 meters per second), and can stand up to shocks stronger than those of Taiwan's 921 earthquake in 1999 or the Sichuan earthquake of 2008.

In addition, it is possible to add a "membrane" (which was developed by MINIWIZ, has been nano-engineered, and whose functions include blocking ultraviolet light, preventing static electricity buildup, and being fire-retardant and self-cleaning) onto a layer of assembled bricks in order to achieve maximum protection against wind, vibration, heat, and fire.

And best of all, from the viewpoint of the bottom line polli-bricks cost much less to manufacture than other building materials. They cost out at about NT$3600-4000 per square meter, whereas a curtain wall of comparable specifications made of glass would need around NT$20-30,000, yet would be only one-quarter as effective at keeping out external heat.

Huang is confident that his bricks outperform glass in virtually every respect, though he confesses with a smile: "Probably the only drawback is that PET bottles don't have the same transparency as glass, so you can't see the scenery outside clearly."

A total of 430,000 PET bottles went into the making of the EcoARK. The environmentally friendly and innovative design is said to have achieved at least seven world "firsts."

The debut performance of the polli-brick came with the opening of the Far Eastern EcoARK, the only pavilion at this year's Taipei Flora Expo sponsored by a private corporation.

This exhibition hall, which took only half a year to build, at a cost of NT$150 million, is shaped like a ship (or, for those without a nautical frame of mind, like a long, narrow triangular piece of cake). It was made using 430,000 polli-bricks-which were in turn remanufactured from 1.5 million PET bottles-set around a steel frame. The exterior walls create a lovely crystalline feeling on their own, but for added artistic effect, 40,000 LED lights have been installed inside the bricks, and when they are turned on at night the building looks like a sparkling diamond.

In terms of temperature control, the entrance to the exhibition hall takes full advantage of the hilly terrain of Yuanshan, as the tip of the triangle redirects the airflow from the northeast seasonal monsoons along the exterior side walls. Add in an interior water wall, waterfall, and mist-spraying system, plus the insulating qualities of the polli-bricks, and the temperature inside the building can be kept three to six degrees Celsius lower than outside. The structure is its own all-natural air conditioner!

In terms of lighting, because the polli-bricks are translucent, during the day it is very bright inside, obviating the need for artificial lighting. For nighttime lighting, solar panels installed on the roof and side walls can store enough power to make the building energy self-sufficient.

With all its carefully thought-out details, the EcoARK-aka the Pavilion of New Fashion-is a genuinely green building with minimum impact on the environment. No wonder it has been such a sensation and has achieved so many world "firsts." It has also once again drawn the world's attention to the creativity and ingenuity that can be found here in Taiwan.