Described for the first time in 1971 by the American architect Michael Reynolds, an earthship → is a self-made house built only re-using scrap materials, following some principles of bioarchitecture. It is generally felt that a sustainable house could end up resulting a mix of unconnected wreck elements, devoid of the living comfort we’re used to. That isn’t true, earthships offer a self-sustaining system that actually exceeds the expectations of a common house: it uses wind and solar energy to produce electricity, it collects and filters rainwater to provide drinking water, it produces year-round food in its indoor greenhouses, it heats up and cools down without influencing the environment and with no economic cost, it treats wastewater without contamination.

Existing examples of earthships show that any project – from the ’70s until today – has been influenced by the materials utilised for the self-build-up, by the design of architecture and by the folk dwellings of the place of construction, as for EVE ←, an earthship settled in Taos (New Mexico, US).

‣ Earthship: la casa auto sostenibile e offgrid per eccellenza, Green.it (IT).
‣ 10 ragioni per cui le earthship sono fantastiche, Offgrid Italia (IT).
‣ In Taos, a community of “voluntary anarchists” is taking off-the-grid living to the next level, Roadtrippers (EN).