Would you pay $5,000 for a cardboard box?

If you answered, “No way!” you’ve spoken too soon because this is no ordinary cardboard box.  This cardboard box is Swiss-made, resin-soaked cellulose (recycled paper), fitted with plumbing, and big enough to bed 8 people in it! Its called the “Universal World House.”

Yes, for the price of a decent used car, you could own your own corrugated crib. . .

And the real treat is that “it 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.”  After all, isn’t that what we always visualized using a veranda for? And you can’t tell me you haven’t wished to shower with the very same slaughtered animal you were going to eat that evening?

So just kick back, relax, and enjoy the view of the sunset from your veranda. . .even if you have to push the hanging carcass out of the way.

All joking aside, while the structure looks a little lacking for cold weather climates (its walls are suppose to be intelligently crafted with an insulating technology), the functionality of a home like this would serve a tremendous upgrade for refugees, lower financial classes, those in hot to mild weather climates, and other situations in which cheap housing could be utilized.

Yes, this house could truly bring much needed comfort to millions of families around the world.  For all its misused blunders, technology offers amazing opportunities for humankind to help each other, and this is just one awesome instance of that. . .

In the end, however, let us not stop at this. . .No, let us not stop until we have faught poverty to its own death, and if that takes forever, may we then be up to the task of never stopping and always fighting. . .forever.

- IgniteTheMind

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