The surreal beauty of New Mexico’s desert Earthships
In 1969, 24-year-old architecture graduate Mike Reynolds beat a path from Ohio to the remote plateaus of the New Mexico desert on his motorcycle. His goal? To injure himself so severely in motocross racing that he wouldn’t be drafted into the Vietnam War. Instead, he did something even more surprising – built a compound of off-grid earth shelters that require nothing from the outside world except its garbage.
Known as Earthships, these buildings are made by packing old tyres, beer cans, and other refuse with earth and cement. Each shelter captures rainwater and solar power and has its own indoor garden and ventilation system; for those who live in this small patchwork of homes, water, power, food, temperature control, and waste are self-contained and self-sustaining.
Reynolds had been battling the mainstream world of architecture throughout his college years. Ensconced in the flourishing counterculture movement, he was convinced that humanity was on a path to its own destruction. Reinventing the way we live was, to him, the only option, and in New Mexico, he found his laboratory.
The New Mexico desert has long been an outpost for scientists, artists, and vagabonds. It’s where the United States government conducted the Manhattan Project to develop and test the atomic bomb. It’s where artists like Georgia O’Keefe and Agnes Martin escaped to find inspiration and creative freedom. It’s even where actors like Julia Roberts and Dennis Hopper have fled to escape life under the microscope.
Like the paintings and sculptures inspired by the area, Reynolds’ Earthships are as much works of art as they are functional abodes. Built into the side of hills like hobbit houses and sporting curved edges with brightly coloured glass bottles poking through their façades, they look like they belong on the Star Wars planet of Tatooine, not the aired plateaus of the American West. There are more than 60 structures now on the piece of land Reynolds bought just outside the small town of Taos. There’s a visitors’ centre where tourists can gape at the giant indoor banana plants and the living room fountains and peruse information on how the buildings regulate temperature, use sewage as fertiliser, and collect rainwater. To purchase an Earthship, you’ll need upwards of £700,000, but if you want to stay in one overnight, you’ll only have to fork over about £100 if you book far enough in advance.
Earthship Biotecture, as the community is called, is now a tourist attraction in its own right and a decades-old source of curiosity for off-the-grid enthusiasts. But it wasn’t always celebrated. When Reynolds’ unconventional building site made it onto the radar of local law enforcement, he was found in contempt of multiple codes and regulations and even had his architecture licence revoked. In 2007, filmmaker Oliver Hodge released a documentary about Reynolds’ struggle to create and pass legislation that would allow him to continue his work. Called Garbage Warrior, it burnished the architect’s status as an eccentric individualist who is decades ahead of his time in his vision for rescuing humanity from itself.
“I feel like I’m in a herd of buffalo,” he says in the film. “And they’re all stampeding toward a thousand-foot drop-off, and they’re just running over the edge. And I’m in that herd. And I’m like, ‘I ain’t goin’ there,’ you know? I’m not gonna go down that way. So I have to somehow affect the whole herd so that they will take a left turn or a right turn and not go off this edge.”
In a post on his website more recently, Reynolds recounted a story of a vision he had in the 1970s when he and his family were living in a barn on the outskirts of Taos, and he was just starting to experiment with building materials. In the vision, he was visited by four wizards, each of whom brought revelations about creativity, seeing the world from a new vantage point, and the importance of pushing against societal norms.
Some might call him a visionary. Others might say he has a messiah complex. Still, others might argue that he is simply reinventing the wheel. Native Americans have been building similar structures of earth and clay for thousands of years in the area, and they aren’t relying on potentially toxic materials like off-gassing tyres. Then, there’s the scalability of the thing. It’s all well and good for 60 well-dispersed homes to treat, reuse, and contain their own sewage and refuse, but it seems naïve to expect it to function as seamlessly on a global, national, or even village-wide scale.
And if isolation is a prerequisite, can it ever be anything other than an experimental community deliberately shunning the outside world? The sense of isolation – of leaving the clogged streets of cities behind – is a familiar and seductive prospect for those who are drawn to utopian communities, just as it is for jaded artists and wanderers in search of solitude and enlightenment. Whether that desire is in concert with turning the herd of buffalo en masse in the same direction is unclear. However, it probably isn’t the point for those who live in New Mexico’s Earthships or whose imagination is captured by them.
Drive 20 minutes into the desert Northwest of Taos, and you’ll see why. Visiting the community today feels like a journey into philosophy and science fiction as much as it does architecture. Set against the imposing backdrop of the blue-grey Sangre de Cristo Mountains, the structures are a sight to behold, a community that is, if not a blueprint for the rest of the world, at least a spectacle of ambition, ingenuity, and persistence.
