Jack MunroYes this looks like a steak but it is in fact a brick.
Usually, when your house’s walls are dripping blood, it’s a sign you are living in the Amityville Horror and it’s time to move. But recent architecture school grad Jack Munro (who is British — big surprise when the British people have the weird ideas) thinks bloody walls could potentially be a feature, not a bug. Munro has discovered that bricks made out of animal blood and sand might be a pretty darn reasonable building material.
What happened was, Munro noticed that there sure are a lot of slaughtered animals in the world, and thus, a lot of animal blood — one slaughtered cow produces eight gallons. So he did a bunch of experiments, and found that baking the blood (yes, ew) yielded a substance with a sort of gluey consistency. He mixed this with sand and lo and behold — the blood brick was born. It is strong. It is waterproof. It’s got potential — especially in desert communities with unpredictable weather, which, let’s face it, we’re all going to live in soon enough.
But, of course, it’s also not ideal. Yes, it might be a great innovation, but it is a brick made of animal blood. Lots of people — vegans, religious folks of all stripes, anyone with a capacity to be grossed out — have strong opinions about animal blood. In fact, Munro suggests that the bricks could be made with blood from halal slaughterhouses, which … dude, they took that blood out for a reason. So if this blood brick thing is indeed going to fly, this Munro is going to have to think for a second or two about how to make and distribute these things, and then hire a serious expert for the marketing.
