I visited the Earthship Welcome Center in Taos, New Mexico
When I was in high school, I encountered the Wikipedia page for earthships for the first time and lost my damn mind. There are guys who live in the desert inside homes made out of trash. The homes look exactly like Star Wars sets. The load bearing part of their walls are made of tires filled with sledgehammered dirt. The interior walls have beer cans in them. The homes are passively cooled and warmed and are half-buried in the earth to make this possible. They all have off-grid water-processing systems which utilize indoor greenhouses and outdoor leach fields to both process wastewater, and grow vegetables and shade plants.
They look fucking nuts. I would never, ever live in one of these, but boy howdy, do they look good:
Many of these photos are actually of "experimental" buildings nobody lives inside. Most of the structures that people live inside do not have visible beer cans anywhere on the walls - they're sealed under concrete or adobe - and most of the homes are partially underground, rather than freestanding. The classic earthship design requires the home to be largely buried under a massive earth berm which assists with regulating the temperature inside the space.
I don't have good pictures of this, but if you stand at the visitor's center and look out, you can see semi-underground homes dotting the nearby hillsides. They all face south, because these homes require south-facing windows to power their passive cooling system. And inside each south-facing window is an indoor greenhouse. Any window you can see just has plants mashed up against it. It's pretty wild.
There are 116 homes in this particular development, built gradually over the years, mostly by a very weird architect named Michael Reynolds. It is not difficult to go online and find ex-"students" of his earthship construction training program complaining about the exploitative, cult-flavored way he runs the organization, and about the way their labor was used to make expensive homes. One reason I would never live in an Earthship is that I am a density freak who wants to live in big ass cities, and these are off-grid homes with large yards for their massive earth berms. Another reason I would never live in an earthship is that some of them seem to have been built in this vaguely pyramid-scheme style, where people come to Taos to sledgehammer the rammed earth tires for little or no pay, hoping that this will give them the skills (though not the money) that they need to eventually go build their own. There are plenty of ways to make rammed-earth structures, and I can't say that this sounds like a good one!
The third reason I probably would not live in an earthship is that they are all built around stacks of used car tires with earth pounded into them. There is a lot of debate about whether tires - which are extremely toxic - should be used in structures like these. There are plenty of people out there building rammed-earth structures which do not contain tires. Earthbags, for example, make a good replacement. The earthship people claim that sealing the tires up inside the wall neutralizes their threat to you, but... you do have to acquire, store, and handle them to get them onto the construction site, and sledgehammer them, don't you? I learned at the earthship visitor center that each tire requires fifteen minutes of pounding. I dunno - the risk doesn't seem worth it to me. The fact that they're handling quite toxic materials definitely also adds a sinister element to any unpaid labor that Earthship Biotecture students are doing to build some of these homes. (Others are built by the people who live in them.)
For me, the appeal of visiting a place like this was not to get inspired to do any of this myself - it's to visit a place that looks fucking crazy. It's absolutely just Star Wars type shit. It looks like an alien planet. If you work in videogames or visual art I cannot recommend coming here enough.
The tour I took at the visitor center - which they call a "welcome center" - was absolutely fascinating. Our tour guide was a guy who had purchased an Earthship after a career in IT specifically so that he could avoid building one himself. He was constantly apologizing for the strange terminology Reynolds has assigned to various parts of the earthship - earthship people call their electric hardware the "power organization module," or POM, and call the box of filters which processes their collected rainwater the "water organization module," or WOM. One of the communities near Taos is called STAR, which stands for Social transformation Alternative Republic. Reynolds' first book about sustainable architecture is called A Coming of Wizards. I had the strong sense that our tour guide understood how weird all this hippie shit was.
We started by checking out the visitor center itself, which was constructed as a kind of example home several decades ago. Our guide kept pointing out the ways in which the visitor center's design was old or outdated - it seems that in the last few decades specifically, the typical design for a new-built earthship has changed a lot and become much more energy-efficient. I'm not certain what all the changes are, but someone mentioned double-paned glass, and there are now internal walls with shutters which can separate the greenhouse from the living area. Modern earthships also contain large-diameter tubes running into each room through the berm from the outside. These "cooling tubes" allow air to enter the earthship at a cooler temperature by releasing heat into the berm before it enters the home.
We didn't get to see much of this "modern" earthship design because I guess all those structures are private homes. After the visitor center, we went to a large churchlike space - also "experimental," apaprently - where we sat through over an hour of (quite interesting!) lectures about different power, heating, and water systems used in earthships.
Our tour guide had not built an earthship himself but had overhauled all these systems in his own home. I found this genuinely fascinating and didn't mind how long it took to get through. The room was indeed nice and cool! There were beautiful trees in it! I gotta say, these seem like nice places to spend time!
After this, we went into EVE - the very Tattooine-like structure I photographed above, with the two squat circular towers. It has several wings - one traditional earthship which functions as the business center for the Earthship Biotecture enterprise, one wing which seems to possibly be a home???, and the central towers, which are a failed attempt to make apartment-like housing suitable for use in cities. Reynolds apparently got a multi-year building code exemption from local governments, which he planned to use to complete this structure. But he failed to do it in time - which is a shame, because I think weird-ass Star-Wars-looking passively cooled apartment buildings would go crazy in Los Angeles.
Now, it seems like the building is both uninhabited and even mostly unused. Several rooms are filled with piles of junk - I think I saw a stack of mattresses in one. It remains, however, a completely fascinating place to be.
I took so many pictures on this tour. I immediately identified a way that we could include earthship-style architectural language in part of one of the games I'm currently working on. I think this place is absolutely a must-see spot for anyone visiting Santa Fe or northern New Mexico generally, but particularly if you work in videogames or visual arts.
A lot of the driving I did through this part of New Mexico felt like driving to another planet. This place is so wildly different from any place I've ever lived - to get over the mountains to Taos, we drove through multiple itty-bitty towns that looked exactly like sets from spaghetti westerns. This is a part of the US where you can see actual collapsing stone ruins and ancient mud-brick church skeletons by the side of the road. There aren't a lot of places in the US where you can see that kind of a thing.
Driving for two hours through that countryside to get to a desert subdivision that looks like a sci-fi movie set was absolutely wild. It was probably the peak experience for me on my vacation - a crazy window into a life I'll never live.