The Earthships

Mike Renoylds, a very clever and motivated man, one day decides that the best way to construct a sustainable building is to use a heap of materials that people are pretty much paying to get rid of, point it towards the sun and catch every drop of water that comes by.

The new 'stanadard' form of the Earthship. This one is near completion

Most people would be happy with that as enough of a challenge, but Mike decides that to add an extra degree of difficulty, he will site his buildings in a desert that can produce temperatures capable of burning you with both heat and cold.

Thus the Earthship was born.

We were fortunate to work on one in New Zealand (see first post) and in the region of Taos, New Mexico, we managed to experience a few more versions of the same concept.

A shot showing the inside of the Phoenix House - note the tropical plants growing in a place where winter gets under -20C.

The Earthship community has grown quickly and there are over twenty of them on the property, which is divided up between lots of shared land and some ‘personal space’ around their own homes.

Some of the buildings are long straight and easy to understand architecturally. Others challenge preconcieved notions of how buildings can and should be built. Perhaps the most spectacular is the Phoenix House, still under construction after five years, but lavishly created and appionted. This is certainly a luxury house and since I was too busy exploring it to take good photos, you would see it best by searching Google Images for ‘Phoenix House Earthship’.

I think my favorite thing about the Earthships is the clever use of materials that most people would see as trash. The bottle walls and windows are pretty extraordinary and the internal greenhouses lend somthing wonderful to the whole atmosphere of the place.

A bottle window made with juice bottles and one Coke bottle in the center.

Mike certainly makes a very strong point with these oases in the desert and that is; If humans can achieve so much in such a harsh land, what can truly be achieved in a fertile one?

This is the sort of climate that the Earthships are in, dry, hot cold and pretty unfertile.