A legacy of living in the most-bombed country per capita in world history, Laotian citizens have spent decades since the Vietnam War dealing with close to 100 million undetonated weapons of targeted destruction.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the US covertly dropped hundreds of millions of bombs on the country, at an average rate of one bomb-load per eight minutes. Today, converted bomb remnants are visible across the country, used virtually intact to loft houses above flood planes, hollowed out and turned into watercraft or containers, or stripped down for scrap.

An entire (now shrinking) nationwide industry has grown up around finding, stripping and transforming cluster bombs into metal pieces and parts deconstructed or refit for various new uses. In many villages, bombshells are visible throughout the built environment.

Photographer Mark Watson took a cross-country bike trip and documented these remarkable cases of reuse. “Scrap from such widespread bombing has been utilized in people’s homes and villages,” Watson said, “for everything from house foundations to planter boxes to buckets, cups and cowbells.”

While it may sound at first like an uplifting story of turning swords into ploughshares, there is a dark side to this tale. To this day, over 100 people die annually from accidental detonations, either from bombs still loose in the countryside or in attempts to deactivate or convert found ordnance.

Non-profit organizations working to clear the country of this danger estimate it may yet take another century to complete the cleanup process (via Inhabitat and Mark Watson of Highlux Photography).

In the last 30 years, the size of a typical home in the United States has shot up from under 1000 square feet to nearly 2500. It begs the question: how much room to we really need in order to live?

Once a Laotian refugee and, now, a German architect, Van Bo Le-Mentzel understands firsthand what it means to be homeless, displaced but also to feel a sense of owning your own space both emotionally and financially.

Thus his contribution to the small homes movement – a do-it-yourself mini-house that tilts and folds to reveal a bed, desk and light, complete with a window as well as lockable door.

In short: it has the very basic essentials for survival, but also is necessarily a space you venture out from and use as an urban home base, not a remote hiding place.

Plans for the one-square-meter (or 1SQM) house are available for free, along with its bare-banes list of essential building components: “20 meters of wooden timbers (3.4 cm x 3.4 cm) for 250 Euro (300 Dollars), Wall Coverings (Sperrholz), 200 Screws, 4 wheels, 1 acryl-glass window, 1 door and 1 day of your lifetime to build it.”