Low-tech Magazine

Heat your house with car tyres and earth

Energy hungry America teaches the world how to build ecological houses.

A dirt cheap and 100 percent ecological house that has all the comforts of an ordinary home, without being connected to the electricity grid, waterworks, sewer system or the natural gas network. It does exist, but in most countries, building one is not allowed.

An Earthship is a completely self-sufficient house that has a natural temperature regulation, without the use of a heating system. The building also generates its own electricity, collects and filters its own drinking water and cleans its own effluent water. The house is partly buried into the earth and is constructed mainly with waste materials; car tyres, aluminium cans and glass bottles. This low-tech building approach is ecologically as well as economically advantageous.

This autumn, the British coastal city of Brighton approved the construction of 16 Earthships. It’s the first time that a European city council has given builders the green light to mass construct this radical ecological housing form. In the United States nearly one thousand Earthships have been built, most of them in the desert of New Mexico. (Pictures: Michael Reynolds)

Lego for Big Boys: habitable shipping containers

Habitable shipping containers promise cheap, modular and comfortable housing.

Cars, washing machines, televisions: almost everything we can buy today is assembled on the conveyor belt of some factory. But our houses are still built on the spot by a team of workers. Accompanied by lots of noise for the neighbours, and hampered by the weather. That could change: a growing number of architects see the very thing in habitable shipping containers.