Beer cans, car tires and water bottles – make up the house that Michael built. Michael Reynolds is the focus of the documentary film, Garbage Warrior, shown last Tuesday at Passing Clouds in Dalston, part of their Permaculture Picture House event which comes round every first Tuesday of the month.

Illustrations by Lindsey Yankey

Michael Reynolds is an American architect who has struggled with the concept of a self-sufficient building for more than thirty years. He has worked on these ground-breaking buildings, based in New Mexico, missioning through the miles of red tape that surround any planning application and eventually lobbying for a test site. Nuclear weapons and aeroplanes get them, so a sustainable living test site seems quite the bright idea : otherwise health and safety worries hold back innovation throughout the construction industry. He calls his concept Earthship Biotecture. Here are the definitions he gives:

Earthship n. 1. passive solar home made of natural and recycled materials 2. thermal mass construction for temperature stabilization. 3. renewable energy & integrated water systems make the Earthship an off-grid home with little to no utility bills.

Biotecture n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.

Earthships have been built in arid semi-desert, which experiences extremes of hot and cold, and at every stage they’ve proven the practicability of using junk materials, like old tyres filled with earth, to build. Garages usually pay to dispose of old tyres, and the potential of really thick walls as heat sinks, which keep the inside of the buildings at a comfortably steady temperature, is more or less ignored in the main industry’s tendency towards pre-fab and quick build construction. The Greater World Community of earthships in Taos, New Mexico, is a conscious response to that approach. It’s a long term development which plans to reclaim damaged land from gravel pits, quarries, or mines – they’ll have a positive impact on the land they build on, encouraging soil deposit with compost and contained sewage facilities (compost loos, if you’re not such a one for marketing talk) and using permaculture principles to trap and direct water run-off.

Though based in New Mexico, Reynolds’ Earthship Biotecture is spreading around the world. Across the world, where tsunamis and hurricanes have struck, people have been far more receptive to radical ideas. The film documents Reynolds and his crew’s response to disaster areas, lending their skills in using anything and everything as construction material where it’s most needed. He also visited the UK in 2003, coming to Brighton where the Low Carbon Trust in the UK has built an earthship, the first over here, a quite beautiful buiding which sits in harmony with its surroundings and stands as monument to the potential of sustainable building. As Amelia’s Magazine covered recently, there is a growing need for a new construction – old housing needs refurbishing to meet low-carbon needs, and the government’s 2016 target for all new housing to be zero carbon (1) is under some strain.

So, can you imagine yourself away from rows upon rows of two-up two-down semis to a future of semi-submerged near self-sufficent earthships built of and on today’s debris? It’s a change of living that will blur town and country, even house and garden, and it might be the best way forward.

Written by Tom Russell on Thursday July 16th, 2009 12:36 pm

Tags:

biotecture, earthship, new mexico, permaculture, reynolds

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