living are abandoning conventional modes of housing for the most radically green alternative – the Earthship.
Invented in Taos, NM, by renegade architect Michael Reynolds, the Earthship is a low impact passive solar home, which doesn't rely on centralized municipal utilities. Thirty years ago, Reynolds realized that “the accepted concept of housing supported by massive centralized systems is not appropriate, safe, or reliable.”
4 He understood that if we were going to be serious about drastically reducing global environmental devastation, we would need to evolve beyond our dependence on centralized systems. Thus, he began pioneering a whole new field of architecture, which he coined “Biotecture” – a synthesis of architecture and biology. Essentially, Biotecture is concerned with building homes which are in congruence with nature, interfacing with the existing systems of the planet instead of exploiting and defacing them. Much like an organism, the Earthship is in a symbiotic relationship with its environment. It is not separate from the earth, but rather in unison with it; harmoniously interconnected, its systems are highly in tune with the organic rhythms of the planet. It does this by adhering to six core principles of sustainable living: heating and cooling without fuel, power generation,
harvesting of water, on-site sewage treatment, in-home food production, and building with recycled materials.
In developing the Earthship, Michael Reynolds tackled the problem of how to heat and cool a home without a conventional heating and cooling system. The
solution was thermal mass, which (much like a battery) stores and releases heat energy. The living spaces in an Earthship are designed as a series of U-shaped rooms, surrounded on three sides by thermal mass in the form of used automobile tires, rammed with densely packed earth. To give you an idea of how densely the tires can be packed, consider that the average tire can store as much as three wheel barrels full of earth.
These U-shaped rooms are aligned towards angled windows along the entire southern face of the building. The windows allow a lot of sunlight to enter, which heats the massively dense walls. In the winter, when the temperature in the house drops below the temperature of the walls, heat is released from the walls and warms the living space to a comfortable room temperature. In the hot summer months, with the sun high in the sky, direct sunlight enters only the front of the home and doesn't heat the U-shaped rooms. Since the Earthship is partially built into the earth, the naturally cool temperature of the earth keeps the Earthship nice and comfortable. Most people are shocked to find out Earthships can maintain room temperature in both the scorching heat of the desert and in the penetrating chill of the winter, making them suitable for nearly every climate on earth. This shattering discovery is not only ecologically friendly, but economically friendly as well. It saves residents from rising heating and cooling costs, which regular homeowners know all too well.
In addition to saving money on heating and cooling, the Earthship’s power is generated by the sun and wind. Power is stored in a series of batteries and sent to a power-organizing module, which converts the energy
Earth to Earthships
Issue 2 | October 2009