Currently watching: Garbage Warrior (2007), 86 mins, dir Oliver Hodge.
“What do beer cans, car tires and water bottles have in common? Not much unless you’re renegade architect Michael Reynolds, in which case they are tools of choice for producing thermal mass and energy-independent housing. For 30 years New Mexico-based Reynolds and his green disciples have devoted their time to advancing the art of “Earthship Biotecture” by building self-sufficient, off-the-grid communities where design and function converge in eco-harmony.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UNYFlcV9R1w
Simon Woolham at Paper Gallery put me onto this documentary after our rubbish conversation in Stockholm. With the current ‘eco chic’ ‘upcycling’ trends doing the rounds on social media, my timelines are often filled with designs from the old student classics-suddenly-cool-again pallets made into tables and old tyres made into planters to more crafty and aestheticised designs such as coat hooks made from old cutlery. Whilst the former is very function orientated, in that it’s using cheap/free and abundant materials to hand that have ideal properties for their reuse, the latter take on a more superficial upcycling design aesthetic. These things look cool in spotlit studios against a white backdrop but place them in an ordinary home full of average consumer items they might look a bit silly with a few bent forks sticking out of the wall.
But the reduce, reuse and recycle ethos has to start somewhere, and a few bent forks might lead to completely reconsidering the consumer tat next to it and the whole nature of the identical chocolate box house it all resides in.
The documentary subject Mike Reynolds didn’t exactly take this path of eco-living enlightenment as he started from the architecture itself. He comments that the traditional practice of architecture barely takes into account the environment or the people that inhabit it. Looking for self-sustainable means of living, he has devised a couple of techniques to build housing termed biotecture (n. 1. the profession of designing buildings and environments with consideration for their sustainability. 2. A combination of biology and architecture.):
Can bricks: beer cans wired together like a brick six-pack and compacted with dirt.
Tyre bricks: bigger versions of the can bricks with compacted dirt in each tyre.
These 2 units can be used to build walls or even domes and can be covered over or left to reveal the recycled materials. Reynolds talks about his revelation of how walls using these materials are excellent at retaining heat (thermal mass) so that even in winter additionally heating sources are not required.
Glass and plastic bottle windows: a la Stig of the Dump, bottle are placed on their sides so the light filters through the base of the bottle. Reynolds comments the coloured bottles look like gems.
Being aware of natural light has enabled Reynolds to build houses with South facing pane windows harnessing the maximum amount of light and enough to see by in daylight hours throughout the house as well as grow food all year round.
Other key elements to his designs include roof design and guttering to collect enough water to self-water the greenhouse and be purified for consumption, solar panels for sustainable power.
The decades of work and refining his designs with teams of enthusiastic people around him to help has resulted in ideal self-sustaining homes, cheap to make, and completely off-grid. The documentary shows him try and navigate the US legal system to enable this kind house building for everyone who wants it. It fails due to massive bureaucracy of the system.
The film follows him and a team to India’s Andaman Islands after a devastating tsunami. The local infrastructure and housing is destroyed and the local population has been reduced to a fraction. Reynolds and his team build self-sustaining buildings with the local community, showing them how to do it themselves after they have gone back home. Reynolds is obviously delighted to have been able to make a difference here, and comments on the contrast between how easy it is to implement new designs on a community scale here, whereas in a supposedly first world country it has proved an arduous and unfruitful journey.
http://www.garbagewarrior.com/
