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).

Bringing together cutting-edge technologies and an ancient approach to resisting earthquake damage, the so-called Quake Column marries tradition and high-tech to create a bold new structural solution needing no mortar nor rebar to reinforce it.

Incan masons historically interlocked complex three-dimensional stone shapes in order to allow movement during earthquakes while preventing buildings from becoming structurally compromised in the process. The puzzle-like interlinking of the constituent parts helps structures resist seismic shocks, keeping them from becoming detached either horizontally or vertically.

A modern-day company in California, Emerging Objects, has taken this page out of history and reapplied it with 3D printing, allowing their new variants of these old blocks to be fabricated quickly, easily and cost-effectively. Unlike their heavy stone predecessors, these new versions are can be lightweight, modular and made on demand, including built-in handles for carrying printed-on instructions showing builders how to assemble them into columns.

These contemporary equivalents are designed to be load-bearing, code-compliant materials that could be used in actual architectural applications of all kinds, all without steel reinforcement or mortar cementing the connections. More on the structural physics at work via Inhabitat: “the absence of resonant frequencies and stress concentration points made the structures more earthquake resistant. During earthquakes, the dry-stone walls built by the Incas would move slightly and resettle without any damage. Rounded corners and an incline of three to five degrees contributed to their stability.”