Paper Homes Provide New Hopes

Weighing less than a Volkswagen Golf and designed as angular and modern deco as anything you'd find in the Hollywood Hills, the new paper house is an eco-friendly solution for the Third World's shantytowns, but I wouldn't be surprised to see them turn up in America eventually.

Invented by Gerd Niemoeller under the Swiss-based company The Wall AG, the 36 square meter home retails for roughly $5,000 and is made almost entirely out of paper--resin-soaked cellulose recovered from recycled cardboard and newspapers to be exact. The material is surprisingly durable and constructed in a way to provide excellent insulation. Each home comes with eight built-in single and double beds, book shelves, a kitchen table with benches, as well as a veranda and a sealed-off area housing a shower and a lavatory.

The 58-year-old engineer who invented the house designed it with refugees and the poorest people in mind. "People don't want to flee their countries, they've been driven to leave their homes out of the need to survive," he told Time Magazine. "The number of migrants, refugees living in improvised housing, is going to grow with climate change, and we offer an alternative." The alternative will provide a more affordable and environmentally conscious substitute to the iron sheds often seen in the slums of the developing world. Some are even excited by the aesthetics the paper homes will offer.

According to Time, more than 2,000 units have already been ordered by a Nigerian company, and inquiries have also been coming in from Angola, Zimbabwe, and South America. Interestingly enough, several Americans are leaving comments on the news site's message board asking how they can purchase the homes for themselves, even though Niemoeller is advertising them by claiming the home "has been designed so that a family can slaughter an animal on the veranda, wash it in the shower and hang it, along with fish, on an integrated washing line."