In his 1989 book, A Coming of Wizards, Michael Reynolds says four mystical beings, “wizards,” have guided his work. He says they taught him to “denormalize” his thinking and “surrender” to his own “energy band.”
The results of his mystical inspiration are revolutionary, inspirational and practical successes in the real world.
Mike is the inventor of the Earthship, a home design that uses recycled materials and nature’s original machinery to create snug, self-sufficient solar houses. When I met him in 1982 he’d already been building Earthships for the better part of a decade. They were scattered around northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. They weren’t like any other houses in the world.
Mike had spontaneously, maybe instinctively, set out to solve a bunch of human dilemmas at the same time.
If energy is precious and the consumption of energy causes environmental damage, then houses should be more efficient. So he half-buried his houses in south-facing hillsides and created their south walls entirely from high-quality insulated glass so they would capture the maximum heating energy from the sun. He built durable, moisture-proof roofs, buried them in soil and planted native plants. He invented a unique ventilation system that pulls cool air from outside and pushes overheated air out through skylights during warm weather.
The Earthships needed to store solar energy when the sun was shining to be used at night and during bad weather. Mike designed massive interior walls three or four feet thick and put them in the south-facing windows. He poured thick floors made of concrete or adobe that soaked up the sunshine all day long, then radiated warmth at night.
Old tires, bottles and tin cans overflow our landfills, so Mike decided to use them as building materials. The massive interior walls of his Earthships are made from old tires. Other walls use cans and bottles like bricks, mortared with concrete or adobe. The “bottle walls” are left unstuccoed so that light shines into his whimsical rooms through a mosaic of multicolored prisms.
To stay off costly, inefficient and unsustainable utility grids, Mike outfitted his houses with photovoltaic solar electricity, wind turbines and water-collection systems. He filtered and reused the water from the sinks and bathtubs in the toilets. From the toilets, wastewater went to the gardens.
Because creating an Earthship — or any innovative home designed specifically for the homesite — is a labor-intensive process, Mike kept the mechanics simple. Anyone can quickly learn to build a wall from concrete and tin cans or bottles. He invented a method of packing sand inside stacks of used tires that creates massive, stable interior walls. You can master the process in a few hours. Once they’re stuccoed they have a beautiful natural shape and they store a lot of solar energy.
Built-in planters grow food, year-round, inside the Earthships. One owner picks bananas in the middle of winter at 7,000 feet elevation in the Rocky Mountains from a tree that sits in the window of an Earthship. Some of them include indoor goldfish ponds.
Mike built several Earthships himself, but soon he was coaching an army of Earthship builders, many of them do-it-yourselfers who couldn’t afford to hire a contractor or a crew, or who just wanted to play a personal role in the creation of their own homes. Naturally, the Earthships came in every shape and size imaginable from little one-room “beer-can bungalows” to the late actor Dennis Weaver’s multi-million-dollar Earthship estate in Ridgeway, Colorado. Reportedly, construction of the 8,500-square-foot home utilized 3,000 old tires and more than 350,000 discarded aluminum cans.
There have been Earthship subdivisions and complexes of Earthship condominiums. Now they’ve been built in Jamaica, Mexico, Nicaragua, India, Japan, South America, Europe and Africa. Mike is the subject of a documentary film, “Garbage Warrior,” and has been on every major television network.
Not every Earthship is beautiful, at least not to passers-by. But look in the eyes of the Earthship owner and you’ll see the unmistakable glow of affection when they talk about their homes, especially if they built the house themselves. To their owners, even the funkiest Earthships are lovable. And some of them are architectural wonders.
The early prototypes were experimental. Some of them seemed to soak up the cold right out of the earth, and no woodstove would heat them. Others broiled their occupants, summer and winter. Sometimes Mike went back and fixed them with a new idea or two. Sometimes the homeowners sorted the solutions out for themselves.
Still, today, nearly 40 years after their invention, they are the cutting edge of sustainable architecture.
I’ve ridden up and down dirt roads with Mike, looking at Earthships and listening to him talk about them. He never talked much about the past. Although he was a licensed architect, the history of architecture wasn’t interesting to him and he didn’t operate in any established architectural tradition. He didn’t even seem to be very interested in the history of the Earthship, his own creation. Mike talked mostly about the future, a future in which the Earthship philosophy would be a major force in the world. The Earthship was, after all, invented for the future.
You don’t see many references to Mike Reynolds’ visiting wizards on any of the thousands of Web pages about Earthships these days. But I keep my copy of A Coming of Wizards near at hand as a reminder that sometimes we need to “denormalize” how we think about things.
Photo: Lisa Haneberg (Creative Commons 2.0)
