Earthship Homes: Affordable, Energy-Efficient Building

Image Gallery Mike Reynolds' Earthship. The house is literally carved out of the hillside. DEBBE SHARPE

Gray towers of rain march across the mesa. Yellow pitchforks of lightning strike the earth amid the distant drone of successive thunderclaps. Black clouds swirl across the blue sky, eclipsing the sunlight and casting ominous shadows over the few dwellings that dot the land. It is precisely these dwellings that have brought architect Michael Reynolds and myself to these 20 acres outside Taos, N.M., on this darkening afternoon.

Reynolds had recently achieved some notoriety as the man who designed a seemingly bizarre house made of tires for actor Dennis Weaver. Unfortunately, most news accounts seem to spend more time on Weaver than on explaining the theory behind the upcycling design. Much more than an actor's folly, Weaver's house is the product of a long search by Reynolds for an economical, self-sufficient form of house construction that would also reduce the stress placed on the planet by conventional building methods. In addition, the houses themselves would encourage a lifestyle more in harmony with the natural order.

As the swollen thunderheads above prepare to loose their cargoes of rain, Reynolds expresses outrage that the homeless problem currently facing nearly every nation around the world today is completely unnecessary. He contends that the high cost of housing is the result of refusing to look at alternatives and to set affordability and self-sufficiency as goals. "What other species on the planet could be in this predicament?" Reynolds asks. "The mud wasps can all make mud nests; beavers can all cut wood. People, on the other hand, are mostly helpless when it comes to building their own homes. Housing has been taken away from people."

For the past 20 years, through much trial and error, Reynolds has been developing a building system which will, in effect, free people from the tyranny of costly mortgages, energy bills and even part of their grocery bills. He personally "test piloted" each experimental energy-efficient structure along the way to ascertain how successful it was. The result is a house design that satisfies his own rigorous criteria. In fact, these are much more than the word "house" implies. Reynolds calls his structures "Earthships" — vessels rooted in the earth, designed to carry people through whatever the future brings: climate change, economic adversity or famine, as well as peace and prosperity. Built primarily from recycled materials (used tires and aluminum cans) and finished with adobe mud, these passive solar Earthship homes can be constructed by unskilled builders and inhabited with little, if any, dependence on the power grid: Heating and cooling are based on a principle called "mass." Power is gleaned from the sun or wind. It sounds outrageous but it seems to work.

Upcycled Home Design