Solving Haiti’s Housing Problems with Old Tires, Bottles

From the Wall Street Journal:

By Sushil Cheema

Mr. Reynolds has built more than 1,000 of the environmentally-friendly structures, including a community of them outside Taos, N.M., through his company, Earthship Biotecture. (Read more about Mr. Reynolds.)

Now he’s bringing earthships to Haiti. Earlier this month, Mr. Reynolds and two builders, along with a cameraman, went to Haiti intending to survey the area to see how they could help. “There was nothing but tents, nothing but cleanup,” Mr. Reynolds says of what he saw in Port-au-Prince.

Instead of just surveying the city, Mr. Reynolds and his team ended up building. A non-governmental organization called Grassroots United, which had contacted Mr. Reynolds before he arrived, met his group at the airport and told him that they had some land upon which he could build. Anticipating his arrival, the organization had gotten Haitian children to collect tires and plastic bottles from the tent camps.

Mr. Reynolds himself had one arm in a cast because of rotator cuff surgery, and the two builders with him both got sick from the water and heat. “The three of us were worthless, pretty much,” he says. But 40 locals, ranging in age from four to 50, built an earthship in just four days under his guidance. “They had nothing to do. They were all eager to learn, and it turns out all the skills we could do, they could do.”

The earthship, just 120 square feet, is made of 120 tires packed with dirt–such tires are the main building blocks of any earthship. Designed to be earthquake- and hurricane-resistant, the Haiti earthship is not completely finished. Mr. Reynolds plans to return in October to add plaster to the exterior and a screened-in veranda with flush toilets, as well as outfit it for solar energy and water collection. He hopes the home will be used as a prototype for more in Haiti, an example of what’s possible. Earthships could be a boon for a place like Haiti, says Mr. Reynolds, where even the capital city has little infrastructure like sewage or electricity. “The most substantial thing I saw down there was a plywood shack,” he says.

The Haiti home isn’t the first that Mr. Reynolds has built in an area hit by disaster. Following the 2004 tsunami, he says, an architect from the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean found his website and asked him if he could help rebuild. There, Mr. Reynolds and his team erected a building made from automobile tires and bottles during a two-week visit. “On our last day there, the monsoons came, and we saw it catching water,” Mr. Reynolds says. Though he hasn’t been back to visit, he hears that the locals now use the structure like a well. The Andaman Islands Earthship was too complex for the locals to replicate themselves, Mr. Reynolds says, but he has since perfected his model for disaster relief to help locals in devastated areas rebuild themselves.

When he returns to Haiti in October, he plans to find a site where he can build a small village of earthships. “It doesn’t have to be in the city because there is nothing in the city anyway,” he says of the lack of infrastructure. “These buildings would provide their own power, their own water, their own sewage (systems).”

Most important, Mr. Reynolds says, is a sense of empowerment instilled in those who helped. “They built the building!” he says. “The real thing that shows it’s possible for them to do it is that they did it.”

from the wall street journal

Libertas1787

Solving Haiti’s Housing Problems with Old Tires, Bottles Aug 03 2010 13:52:10 Roko Tep, It is good to see other engineers become interested in earthships. I am a structural engineer in the US and have been living in an earthship for 8 years now. These are a great solution to many housing challenges across the world. They work well for any income of people from areas like Haiti to wealthy individuals. I hope to see them become more universal.

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athurart09

Re:Solving Haiti’s Housing Problems with Old Tires, Bottles Aug 27 2010 08:11:27 Fatima wrote: My non-profit organization is working in the small town of Lester, about 5 hours north of PAP. I am really interested in this idea for Haiti. We have land that we are looking to buy to build a community center in Lester and it would be great to use this concept. Thanks for sharing. __________________ Watch Takers Online Free

#5076

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