What a load of rubbish

Built from waste and dirt cheap to run, Mike Reynolds' earthships just might save the planet, says Steve Rose
An earthship, constructed out of recycled materials
'Somewhere between pueblo-style adobe, Gaudi and Tolkien.'... an earthship
Mon 29 Nov 2004 10.09 EST

Mike Reynolds does not have a high opinion of today's architects. "They're like doctors or lawyers," he says. "They're all uppity about what they are, and to me they're just fuckin' up the world. I can appreciate modern architecture on an art level, but what good is art when there's a flood coming?"

A bright-eyed 59-year-old with two pairs of glasses permanently perched on top of his mane of grey hair, Reynolds is himself an architect, but one who has spent the past 30 years operating virtually alone. And from what started out as a hippie ideal of an alternative lifestyle, he has devised a possible model for houses of the future.

"The analogy I make is, if you're going to sail across an ocean, the first thing you want with your vessel is for it to float. What good is it to be beautiful if it gets out the harbour and sinks? These buildings that architects are doing, some are beautiful, but they don't float in today's world. Architecture either has to evolve or hang it up."

Reynolds designs ships that float. Earthships, in fact, which he defines as "independent vessels to sail on the seas of tomorrow". And although they're not an alternative to the entire practice of architecture as we know it, they make current standards of "green" housing look like half-measures.

Earthships are entirely self-sufficient. They can be built just about anywhere. They don't need to be connected to any utilities, and they don't harm the environment, nor do they require any significant sacrifice in terms of living standards, unless you're fond of long showers.

They are heated by the sun, generate electricity from solar and wind energy, and catch rain water from the sky. They process their own sewage through plant beds, which also provide fresh bananas all year round. Plus, they're built from materials that would otherwise be regarded as problematic waste, particularly tyres. Packed with earth, stacked like bricks and plastered over, tyres make the perfect building material, says Reynolds.

In essence, an earthship is something like a cross between a bunker and a greenhouse. Its living spaces are typically U-shaped cavities hollowed into the slope of a hill and lined with tyre walls on three sides. The open end of the U is fronted with glass, so during the day, the sun shines in and provides heat. At night, the thermal mass of the earth surrounding the rooms radiates that heat back. No other form of heating or cooling is required.

There are rules about their orientation (they must face south in the northern hemisphere, to catch all the available sunshine), and there are limits to their dimensions, but once built, earthships cost virtually nothing to run. Reynolds cites a happy customer for whom he built a two-bedroom earthship a couple of years ago: "She wrote and told us the lowest temperature in her house was 69F [21C] and the highest 76F [24C]. And her total utility bill for the year was $47 [£25]."

Viewed from the cutting edge of contemporary architecture, earthships could easily be perceived as ungainly and retrogressive. They possess few of the qualities for which architecture is conventionally admired - lightness, spaciousness, structural daring. Judging by existing examples, the prevailing aesthetic is somewhere between pueblo-style adobe, Gaudi and Tolkien.

But arch-modernist Le Corbusier famously defined a house as "a machine for living", and the earthship is arguably more of a machine than any contemporary home. For Reynolds, the aesthetic question is reversed. The uselessness of conventional houses makes them ugly; earthships, on the other hand, are shaped to a large extent by functional necessity.

"I could try and make them look like conventional houses, but why take a Porsche and make it look like a covered wagon?" Reynolds deploys another nautical analogy: "It feels like I'm crossing the Atlantic on a boat and people have been washed overboard. I'm throwing them a life preserver, and they're rejecting it because it's supposed to be white and I've got a green one."

Earthship design evolved in the deserts around the town of Taos, New Mexico, which are now scattered with Reynolds' previous experiments. He grew up in Kentucky, studied architecture in Cincinnati, then headed west in the early 1970s, ostensibly to race motorcycles.

Then the growing environmental movement got him thinking about waste materials. He built structures using bottles, tyres and beer cans, ranging from modular houses to his own meditation pyramid. In those days, Reynolds' architectural theories were part of a grander vision, which he outlined in his book A Coming of Wizards - a Messianic melange of poetry, architecture, and cosmic philosophy. Much of it was based on knowledge communicated to him by the spirits, or wizards, who visited him in his pyramid.

By the 1990s, Reynolds had ditched the wizards and coined the term earthship to describe the solar pit-houses he was developing. He started to build colonies of them, most of which have since failed - not because of the performance of the earthships, but because of community issues and building codes.

Reynolds is a firm believer in testing ("They test cars, drugs and atomic bombs. Why can't we test housing?") but his main struggle has been against bureaucracy. "As I look back on three decades, 75% of my energy and time has gone into fighting to do this. Only 25% has gone into actually doing it. I almost got put in jail, I almost went broke several times. I've been married five times. I've had times with tears rolling down my face, wondering how I'm going to make a living."

Steadily, though, Reynolds' mission has gained momentum. There are now more than 1,000 earthships on the planet, he estimates. His latest New Mexico community, the 600-acre Greater World, is on the right side of the law and flourishing, and now he's spreading the word abroad. The first Earthship Summit took place recently in Brighton, where one of the UK's first earthships is nearing completion (there's another in Fife).

Daren Howarth, the driving force behind the Brighton project, is keen for Britain to turn on to earthships, which could fulfil the government's desire for energy-efficient housing and lower greenhouse gas emissions. The Brighton earthship, in Stanmer Park, will operate as an information centre for Reynolds' architecture, and will hopefully motivate visitors. "I don't think it would be difficult for someone to build one for themselves," says Howarth. "We've proved it can work in Brighton, and there's such a recognition that we need to be taking bold steps now that I doubt planning permission would be an issue."

Earthships have proved their viability in the American desert and the Sussex countryside, but if they are to be a credible alternative to conventional housing, Reynolds will have to make them work in cities. This is his next mission, he says. "Let us do it! If we were to get into a place like Brighton, I'd buy an east-west running city block, tear everything down, salvage all the materials and put up a bank of earthships. You could build a series of platforms, maybe six or eight storeys, with concrete posts and beams, and you'd have space underneath for parking. People would go apeshit! Soon other city blocks would be coming down."

In reality, Reynolds knows he'll have difficulty convincing Brighton, or anywhere else, to give him a city block to experiment with, but eventually his conviction is likely to win through. "People love their old buildings, even though they're worthless," he says with a smile. "That's tradition. You're throwing them the green life preserver, and they're just going to sit there and drown."

· For more information about earthships, go to earthship.com. The Brighton earthship can be found at lowcarbon.co.uk