Wheel Estate : ‘Earthship’ Concept Uses Discarded Materials to Build Low-Cost, Energy Self-Sufficient Houses
Two miles up a steep primitive road, where the wind slips across a ridge clad in fragrant ponderosa and pinon, architect Michael Reynolds led a dozen visitors on a tour of his home building project.
Nimble as a mountain goat, Reynolds scampers up ladders and skids down the rocky slope, eager to point out the fine points of the construction:
The glass-fronted structures are made mainly of dirt, old tires and beer cans.
The houses have been built to prove the practicality of a design that Reynolds hopes will radically reduce the need for coal-fired or nuclear-generated power: the “earthship.”
“Once we have these, we can sail anywhere on the planet,” Reynolds said, and he means it. Having already built earthships in the deserts and mountains of the Southwest, he’s betting they will work equally well in the tropics and in colder, wetter northern climates.
The culmination of nearly 20 years of tinkering, the earthship is based on a deceptively simple design.
It calls for side-by-side U-shaped rooms carved from the earth, each opening onto a window-walled hallway lined with planters. Oriented south-by-southeast, each earthship is heated entirely by the sun, which also powers photovoltaic cells that provide for electrical needs.
The earth’s mass is key to the earthship’s functioning.
Instead of insulating away from the ground, as in conventional buildings, Reynolds uses the earth’s heat-retaining properties to maintain a steady temperature inside his houses.
When the sun goes down, the heat that the walls have absorbed all day radiates back into the room. For extended cloudy periods, each earthship has a single fireplace, which Reynolds says is more than sufficient to keep it warm.
To build walls up from grade (or to create the walls that separate each U), Reynolds packs old tires solidly with dirt and stacks them like giant rubber-encased adobe bricks. The earth-filled tires also act as heat batteries, Reynolds said.
Reynolds uses aluminum cans and mud to fill between the rounded sides of the tires, then applies a fine Southwestern-style mud plaster over the whole thing. Elsewhere in an earthship, he is likely to create non-load-bearing walls using beer bottles as bricks secured in a mortar matrix.
In keeping with his sense of the earthship as a self-contained “vessel,” Reynolds pipes “gray” water from sinks and tubs into the planters, where flowers and vegetables grow year-round.
With the tire walls stuccoed over, the finished product exudes the snug charm of a traditional Southwestern adobe house, yet, Reynolds said, “It is better, structurally and thermally, than adobe.”
Aesthetic considerations are secondary for Reynolds, for whom form strictly follows function.
“I’m out to reduce the stress level on the planet,” he declared. Traditional building methods, he said, emphasize expensive technologies that separate people from their environment and drain natural resources. For Reynolds, the point of an earthship is to take its owner “off the power grid.”
Reynolds has been dreaming of an affordable, earth-friendly house for a long time.
The Louisville, Ky., native graduated from the University of Cincinnati architecture school and moved to Taos in the late 1960s. Although he’d done his graduate work in urban architecture, Rey-nolds was unsettled by the problem of indestructible objects such as tires and aluminum cans littering the landscape.
He decided to buy 20 acres of cheap land on the mesa west of town, where he began experimenting with house designs that addressed his environmental concerns. The sometimes bizarre results included a geodesic dome, a meditation pyramid built of beer cans and a number of houses that tried to capture the sun’s heat--many of which he field-tested by living in them.
Through trial and error, Rey-nolds evolved a basic design that uses available solar energy while making use of materials otherwise destined for landfills. He built his first earthship in 1987 at a cost of $17 a square foot.
Reynolds’ enthusiasm for the earthship concept is contagious. He estimated that 25 to 30 owner-built earthships have sprung up around Taos, while he fields dozens of inquiries a month from people around the country interested in the design. Reynolds even built a $1-million, 10,000-square-foot custom model in Ridgeway, Colo., for actor Dennis Weaver.
But the project that has taken most of Reynolds’ time for the past year is REACH (for Rural Earth-ship Alternative Community Habitat), which he views as the earth-ship’s ultimate acid test.
Reynolds and a group of friends got together to buy a 55-acre tract that runs up an 8,500-foot ridge on a mountain north of town. Although the site was miles from the nearest power line, the only thing needed to get started was a dirt road.
“We were building the day after we closed on the land,” Reynolds said. Using jackhammers powered by solar panels and old tires brought in by truck, Reynolds and his crew crafted a stair-stepped series of earthships carved into the 45-degree slope.
He has a three-year research and development permit from the state Construction Industries Division, which gives him a variance from standard building codes. Reynolds credits the state with being open-minded enough to let him pursue his vision over the years.
On a warm afternoon, Reynolds led one of the seminars he puts on every three weeks for people interested in building their own earthships, taking the visitors on a tour of the REACH site.
Bearded, with shoulder-length brown hair, the 46-year-old Rey-nolds resembles an intense Old Testament patriarch in blue jeans as he preaches the virtues of his invention.
He starts with the uppermost structure, a studio and office that connects with the house he is completing for himself and his wife, Chris Simpson. “You’re mostly carving a hole out of the ground and roofing over it,” he explained.
The 2,000-square-foot house immediately below his, equipped with a meditation platform, composting toilets and flagstone paving, will belong to Weaver, a strong supporter of Reynolds’ work.
The front of each house consists of a wall of insulated windows pitched for maximum solar gain. The rooms are hewn from living rock that will eventually be sealed with linseed oil. The roofs, flat and highly insulated, rest upon massive peeled-log beams, identical to the vigas found in traditional Southwestern architecture.
“Nobody wanted this land--it was unbuildable,” Reynolds told his listeners. “This is the most radical slope we’ve ever built on.”
No special measures were needed to ensure the stability of the structures, however, because earthships distribute their weight evenly and create no point loads, Reynolds said. “The per-square-inch weight is not much more than a person standing,” he said.
Although the earthships built near town get their water from wells, Reynolds has designed a rainwater catchment and storage system for the REACH project. A single mountain rainstorm is sufficient to fill each of the 3,000-gallon cisterns, he said. A filtration system will make the water potable, he adds.
Reynolds was adamant from the start that earthships be affordable and so low-tech that a would-be owner could take part in virtually every aspect of construction. Building costs range from less than $20 a square foot to $80 or more, depending on what features are desired and whether the owner helps out.
(In a rough comparison, the construction cost for a production-type home in Los Angeles County would run around $38.)
Reynolds took an innovative approach to home ownership with the REACH project, in which the property was bought communally and the owners paid only for the land upon which their house sits. His 21-year-old stepson, who has built earthships for others, scraped together $1,000 for a home site.
“For a thousand dollars, cash, he was able to start building his house,” Reynolds said. “He’ll never experience a mortgage in his life--or a utility bill.”
The affordability and energy efficiency of Reynolds’ designs--as well as the fact that they require virtually no infrastructure, have found an audience.
His self-published how-to book, “Earthship, Volume I,” (Solar Survival Architecture, P.O. Box 1041, Taos, N.M., 87571) has sold 5,000 copies. He’s hard at work on Volume II, which will focus on earth-ship components, such as solar collector panels and super energy-efficient appliances.
The first book has been translated into Spanish as part of a program run by Brigham Young University to promote home building and ownership in developing countries. Demonstration-model earth-ships are due to be built in Mexico and Bolivia as a result, Reynolds said.
Reynolds said he could have made a fortune building the marketable Southwestern-style adobes that are popular in Santa Fe and elsewhere. As it is, he spends nearly every waking minute promoting the earthship concept.
Said Reynolds:
“This is my religion, my yoga, my work, my hobby, my livelihood and my home.”
Resources For more information, write or call:
Solar Survival
P.O. Box 1041
Taos, N.M., 87571
