Cozy Residence, 3 BRs + Trash

Architects once regarded Michael Reynolds as a wild man. These days his designs for homes made entirely from discarded materials are gaining new respect.

You know you’re due for your 15 minutes of fame when you appear on The Colbert Report. For Michael Reynolds, that happened this year, on March 31.

“We pick bananas in the living room from the sewage system,” Reynolds said partway through the interview.

A deadpan smile spread across Stephen Colbert’s face. “You’re making that up,” he said.

In fact, Reynolds can pick bananas in his living room. Reynolds is a renegade architect -- he calls himself a biotect -- who has cast aside his formal training in order to make houses out of garbage. Among his favorite techniques: using a sledge­hammer to pack discarded tires with dirt to serve as foundations for his walls, and building the rest of the walls with glass bottles for bricks and mud in lieu of cement. Blue vodka bottles and green wine bottles do nicely and lend his structures a bit of razzle-dazzle.

Inside his home in Taos, New Mexico, the sinks and showers drain into a water recycling system that feeds what Reynolds calls the jungle. This is where his bananas grow, at a very untropical 7,000 feet above sea level. The temperature often drops into the single digits in January there, yet even in the dead of winter he’s still happily eating his home­grown fruit -- ripened without heat lamps or even a basic home heating system.

Reynolds’s designs take advantage of the basic properties of mass, namely the ability of an object -- any object -- to store solar radiation. He builds his walls thick, angles the structure in the direction of the sun, and lets it soak up the rays. When the temperature drops at night, the walls radiate the heat energy they absorbed earlier that day, supplying his home with all the warmth it needs. To power his flat-screen TVs and his computer, among other modern creature comforts, he has solar panels and a windmill. And he’s angled and grooved all his roof surfaces to channel rainwater into a cistern that supplies his water. He lives completely off the grid.

His houses, which he calls Earthships, look as if they were freighted off the set of some fictional planet in Star Wars. For the past several decades he’s been building them just about anywhere there’s demand, in the United States and beyond, and written books showing others how to do it themselves. Along the way he’s had his architect’s license revoked for failing to abide by building codes (not that he’s let this stand in his way), and he’s fought for zoning laws that would allow him to build houses for those who want them without getting slapped with injunctions by town planning officials.

Reynolds’s work has received its warmest welcome in developing and disaster-stricken regions where both infrastructure and building codes are close to non­existent. In the Andaman Islands, Reynolds and his team helped locals rebuild in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami, and entire families came out to collect bottles, pound mud into tires, and learn how to build homes with rainwater catchments that provide both shelter and a continuous water supply.

Throughout his career, he’s received sporadic media attention, but as he describes it, the stories essentially said, “Look at this freak.” But over the past year, now that eco-living is all the rage, things are different. He says he’s getting a call from a reporter at least once a week, and in April the Sundance Channel aired Garbage Warrior, a feature-length documentary about Reynolds and his earth-friendly approach to dwelling.

Reynolds is now looking for a suitable site for a demonstration project in New York City -- a place that seems as ill-suited for an Earthship as any, and where people who live off the grid are called homeless. Reynolds doesn’t seem to care. “You can stand on a soapbox and scream about the way the world works, or you can show people that there’s another way,” he says. “I’m just saying, I’m going to do it a different way.”