Rammed Earth Building With Tires - Earthships

[noobiechickenlady]

Here's another green building technique for you, Sally.

This is what I actually want to work on, as I'm constantly seeing tires in the dump sites around here. Not for a house, but for a cool storage building, cobbed over of course

http://spam.bluerockstation.com/earthshiphome.html

"Christened an Earthship by designer/architech Michael Reynolds, literally thousands of these homes (made primarily from old automobile tires and beer cans) have been constructed in the Southwestern U.S. This project is the first earthship constructed within the state of Ohio.

The concept is pretty cool - taking advantage of the natural heating and cooling properties of the earth, the passive heat of the sun, discarded & problem waste materials and mixing these with an embracing attitude towards your environment - the result is a comfortable and peaceful place to live."

And of course you can link to the original site from the above page, http://www.earthship.net. My stupid network won't let the page finish loading, but I'm pretty sure it's a local problem.

 

[big brown horse]

Now that is cool! Pop can walls? Awesome! I wish more builings could be made this way and keep all those tires out of the ditches, land fills (land fulls)and the Gulf of Mexico. :/

 

[dragonlaurel]

I love the idea of tire walls. Very strong safe nest to live in. I'd make part of the south end a greenhouse/kitchen garden and let it heat the home in winter.

 

[noobiechickenlady]

Yep! That's exactly what they did in Ohio. Well, actually the whole front face is glass, angled to catch the sun better. The article said they wished they'd done them vertically, because of leaking. They get tremendous solar gain & the tires/dirt just soak it up & radiate it back at night.

I bet an overhang positioned to allow winter sun & block summer sun would clear up a lot of the issues. The greenhouse area, as they called it, is just windows, without an overhang.