First Aluminum Can House
In the early seventies the can companies came out with aluminum cans. They would last forever unlike the old steel ones. Soon they were everywhere; on every street, road, and alley; and in every park and parking lot all over the world. The can companies had created my next building material. The structure of this house was concrete post and beam. The aluminum can wall panels infilled the structure and created both exterior and interior finishes. It was southern oriented and had significant solar gain. I built it for $25,000. I was just glad someone wanted to pay anything for an aluminum can house. The owner sold it for $65,000.
1975 First Water Can House
The Walls are the Heat Source. This solar house by Mike Reynolds was photographed in late autumn to show the angle at which the sun hits water storage walls. The walls are made of aluminum cans, filled with water and embedded in concrete. Heat absorbed in the walls radiates out naturally at night.
2nd Water Can House
I had made a deal with a brewery in Tucson to can me some water in aluminum cans without pop tops for these houses. Then an order came at the last minute with pop tops. I opted to go ahead and use them cause they were late already – stupid move. In this house every few weeks you hear “popfzzzzzz!”. Yes, the pop tops are failing inside the wall one at a time – guess they’ll do that until the last one has popped. Other than the pop top issue, it was a great idea which lead me to beating dirt in to tires for much more thermal mass.
I was beginnig to get interns from architectural schools. Some of them played music with me and some of them helped me build weird rooms out of garbage. There was always someone who
appreciated the early Earthship concepts as they were ermerging. The “Tastee Freeze House”, opposite, sold from the drawings before it was finished.
The Spinach House 1977
Back in the late seventies, my friend John Painter had fronted a piece of land for me to spec a tire house on. It was in an early Taos, NM conventional subdivision full of adobe style homes. This set the stage for yet another experience of getting served dog shit and rasberries on the same plate…
A 1969 blue Chevy Nova is screaming down a gravel road in a picturesque residential area of Taos, New Mexico. Dust is bellowing in a huge cloud behind the car as it slides almost out of control on every turn. The yellow leaves are fallin’… it’s November.
“Get off my fucking car!” screeches Gini, my second wife. I am straddeled across the hood of the car she is jerking from one side of the road to the other. I am holding on to the vent cavity at the base of the windshield. My feet are getting flung from one side of the hood to the other, slicing my legs on the hood ornament each time they are whipped over it. I’m screaming “please don’t leave; I love you” about the time she finally throws me off the hood. I land on a barbed wire fence that boarders the dusty gravel road. Lying there against the fence in a cut, bruised and bleeding pile, I watched the faint image of the car through the giant dust cloud as it disappeared around the next curve. “she didn’t even slow down to see if I was hurt” I said out loud through a mouth full of dirt on a dust covered face with streaks of wet tears running down and making mud on my chin.
We had been living in the SPINACH HOUSE which clearly looked like it landed there and the neighbors hated it, largely cause of the tires. One of the neighbors, a local contractor, had just tried to run us off the road a few days earlier and this was very stressful to a an extremely sensitive Gini. Then when I chased the contractor down and threaten to break him into little pieces; that stressed Gini out even more. She couldn’t take the stress any longer and packed up her son John in the Chevy Nova and left me for the third or fourth time. A few months later the home appeared in the AIA Journal with glowing remarks about reducing the environmental impact of housing in the future.
