EARTHSHIP
The idea of the Earthship is the same as with a spaceship, that just as a spaceship the earthship should contain everything that a person need to survive without help from the outside world.
There are a few earthships around the world, but most of them are in New Mexico in the small American town Taos that is located in the desert where the founder of the idea, architect Michael Reynolds experimented with his disciples for decades to obtain fully self-sufficient houses with as little environmental impact as possible.
It is based on a technique successfully tested in Taos in the United States (first prototype of Michael Reynolds, erected in the 1970´s). The main part of the frame work contains out of used car tires. The tires are filled with sand and stones and then trimmed with mud mixed with straw, as reinforcement.
It is built mostly out of recycled or local materials. The building is oriented to the south and receives sunlight through large windows with double glazing. At night, the heat retaines by isolation-curtains. The solar heat is stored up in the heavy frame-work and released slowly to the house.
An Earth Ship is a largely self-sufficient entity. As I mentioned, there are parallels with a spaceship and a sailing ship. Earthship´s gets it´s energy from the sun and from the wind (which is also solar energy). Inside is a greenhouse where they grow food. The electricity, as I said comes from solar cells and wind turbines, gets stored in batteries. The ceiling have a "rain collector" that provides the residents drinking water. The waste water from showers and so on flows on through the pots in the greenhouse and give the vegetables nutrient before it is reused a second time to flush the toilet, then purified to a third round before being released.
There are critics who consider how environmentally friendly it really is to build houses of aluminum cans that can be recycled and old car tires containing carcinogenic PAH oils and emollients and perhaps heavy metals? but such tires are too poorly studied in order to be able to establish a health risk, one can also imagine that the tires are used so long with a lot of wear and heat so that the toxins already aired out.
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Earth ship in Sweden
The Earthships consists of a residential where the temperature should be comfortable all year round. Above it, facing the south, there is a greenhouse part which acts as a buffer zone for heat insulation and protection against the cooling wind. In Sweden and other colder climates there is two buffer zones to further absorb heat. The hope is by having these two buffertzones making it through the winter, but so far, there´s not a finished earthship in Sweden, so it is difficult to know if the concept works here. Or rather, we do not know yet what is required in order to make it work, that you can make it work is obvious. It's all about how much insulation and money you invest in your construction. But if it´s to expensive, it's not sustainable no matter how good you think the idea and the ideas behind are.
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but since we've had history of architecture, I will focus more in the architecture.
The nice thing about the earthship is that every design differs from the other ones, so they all look completely different, but what they usually have in common is that all forms are incredibly vibrant, the design is not the angular clean design that most new houses have, but everything feels very more vivid and almost as a little fairytale, many of the earthships have an exterior fasade made out of clay that is often slightly wavy in form, and not completely straight, they cast in colored glass and stones in the walls so that the house gets a fabulous embellishment, so if you are an artist and are interested in alternative building methods, then the earthship is a perfect alternative where you can find an outlet for your artistic necessities .. But if your eyes enjoys modern forms more, there are also amazing examples in the modern style.
THE WATER SYSTEM
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Thomas Egge 16/09-2012
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