Made sure to visit earthship central outside of Taos, NM and my favorite part of the architecture is the permanent garden in the front. One definitely needs to make peace with the odor, but I love the smell of a greenhouse anyway.
this post was submitted on 25 Nov 2024
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Is it the rubber that smells?
no, the tires are well sealed behind adobe. The smell is from the huge amount of super healthy wet soil all along the windows, its the primary thermal sink for the passive solar and there is a LOT of it. IIRC, the guide said there was about 10 cubic yards in the planters, which is a standard dump truck.
I eventually figured out that NM stands for New Mexico but for several seconds there my brain would only give me "North Marolina".
I want one of these so bad
I think I've heard there are concerns about recycled rubber off-gassing, but otherwise I think it's a really cool idea as well. The sculpted-looking exterior gets bonus points for style.
Perhaps, but they're old tires, not new. Most of the outgassing happened years ago. But these structure are designed to regulate temperature with constant airflow. If there are any fumes, they're going outside.
Step one - get a shovel.
Is step two get friends with more shovels?
Probably!
I considered trying to incorporate a lot of ideas from this and build a place here in Japan, but the insurance side of it made things basically impossible, especially given how prevalent large earthquakes are here. That's not to say there's nothing to take away from it here, it's just that certain materials and design choices shouldn't be done here. There are a couple of earthships in Japan, but IIRC they're not insured at all and every single one has to be approved by an independent architect and engineer or be in questionable legal status.
Unfortunately, zoning laws make these impossible in most places. The side of me that believes in individual liberty thinks that if you own the property, it should be your damn business what you build there. The part of me that believes in having a functional society sees all the ways that kind of lack of regulation could be abused.
The tires are a really terrible idea that makes it much harder to ram the rammed earth. That increases the labor demands of something that's already extremely labor intensive (not to mention what trying to swing a sledgehammer at an angle into the wall of a tire you're standing over probably does to your back).
They also can only really be used in the desert.
But the way the various parts of the earth ship support each other's functions is pretty good. We really ought to make our city's systems work like that though, instead of building isolated self-contained houses.