Dan Phillips and Creating Houses from Recycled Materials

I just found this excellent video, from TEDxHouston, of a talk given by a man named Dan Phillips on the creation of homes from recycled and re-purposed materials. I definitely thought that it was going to be meat and potatoes on home building and how to use/find materials to use. Boy was I wrong!! This, most excellent, talk is as much about philosophy of home construction, and how we live within our homes/communities, as it is anything else.

Mr. Phillips discusses basic philosophy in the terms of how we seek, build, finance, and live in our homes. A really interesting way to approach things indeed. He breaks it down into two major ways of looking at homes based on Friedrich Nietzsche's concept of the Apollonian and Dionysian. Now Nietzsche wasn't the first to discuss these two in opposition to each other, I think that was probably Plutarch, but Nietzsche went the extra mile to oppose the two diametrically. The Apollonian being the ordered, the ideal, the logical, the thinking, the appreciation for visual and tactile things, whereas the Dionysian is the chaotic, the intoxicated state, the instinctual, the feeling, the appreciation for reality (organic structure?). Applied to modern homes you have the Apollonian McMansion, and the Dionysian [name your organic/sustainable/recycled home design ethos].

Within this framework Phillips breaks down the ideas behind his work and why it is important. The largest driving force, within the home construction industry, is the waste created by the consumer. Formally waste was all over, the industrial revolution had a dirty, wasteful start (think your turn of the century saw mill or steel furnace), now we are presented with a industrial process that is certainly wasteful in terms of pollution but not necessarily use of raw materials. Modern mills and plants that make materials for use in home construction have the process of getting the most out of a raw material to a T. If you have ever been present at, or watched a video of, a modern saw mill in action you will have undoubtedly noticed the advancements made in production of dimensional lumber. Computer technology has allowed a mill to calculate the most efficient use of a log within milliseconds and then cuts it accordingly, gone are the days of cutting 2x4's from one log then 4x4's the next and so on. The problem of waste lies with the consumer.

Phillips gives an example that I, myself, have been guilty of, turning away a piece of lumber because it is somewhat warped. Another example is throwing out the off cuts of pieces of lumber and not using them for other projects and applications. Yet another is replacing any piece of a home just because of a minor imperfection that changes or, in the eyes of most, depreciates its value. This is as bad an example of wanton over consumption as any. Years ago people wouldn't waste anything they bought when building a home or making anything in particular. Today we throw away most of what we buy.

Mr. Phillips believes that a return, or more like a shift, towards the Dionysian side of life, is required in order to conceive of and create a less wasteful way of life. Mr. Phillips, you are preaching to the choir. This shift from an ordered way of building would allow us to get in touch with a more organic and natural expression of our wants and needs. His ideas are quite provocative and I strongly urge you to take aside for a few minutes and watch his talk. Without further diatribe, here is Mr Phillips.



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Frugality is here to stay? Hopeful but doubtful...

For my inaugural post on this new blog of mine I figured I would spare the usual mission statement and diatribe associated with such a thing and say something simple. Ladies and Gentlemen, as a planet we are screwed and as a nation we are in a worse situation than most. That is likely to be the theme of many posts here. And so you don't get confused other common themes you can expect to see will be about technologies that may be considered "green" but are more of a necessity to life in the future, surviving in the post oil age, problems faced by our nation and our nations young people, and just about anything else that strikes my interest.

On to the post.

This morning while hoping to be called into work I was, as with every morning, watching the news. What caught my ear was a young holiday consumer being interviewed saying "cheap is the new black". I laughed at the idea and watched on. The report unfolded into an explanation of the use of coupons porting over from a analog paper form to the digital realm of smart phones. I like the idea of coupons and spending less for what you want to buy. Coupon technology has moved this forward a good amount, and at the very least its now easier than cutting up your newspaper every Sunday. However all this coupon stuff isn't the real point I'm trying to get at. The closing remarks of the segment, made by a middle aged holiday shopper with a slight accent, that said "frugality is here to stay".

Frugality is here to stay? I could certainly hope so, but has this latest recession really broke Americans of our addition to consumerism? I really doubt that it has. Regardless of my thoughts on the matter nation wide we are spending less than we have in years past. Despite the ham fisted efforts of the federal government with its cash-for-clunkers program, retail spending is down or slowing. Trade deficits are growing. Every segment of the retail economy, with the exception of box stores, is shrinking. And everywhere in the nation signs of the times are clear, but will we learn our lesson?

What is the lesson? Well to answer your question I'll be a dick and ask you to take part in an exercise with me. If you are in your home office or living room on your laptop or at the kitchen table, etc, I want you to look away from your computers and look around. Notice for me the amount of consumer items you have in your home. How many did you buy without having the cash for them? How many do you use every day, or every week for that matter? How many are the biggest, shiniest, most complicated model you could buy? How many come from China or other foreign powers? How many would only be able to be manufactured in an economic and industrial system based on the exploitation of fossil fuels? If it turns out that your looking around your house thinking "no way I never even noticed this stuff" your starting to get my purpose.

As a country we have sold ourselves to a consumer lifestyle. Our identities are bought and sold, right at the end of the highway at the strip mall, boxed up and shipped across massive oceans on equally mammoth container ships, from the expansive factory complexes of China, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Etc.... For what ends? So I can watch my morning news on a 40" Samsung LCD? We buy what we want because it is made easy. But it is only easy because there is a demand for easy credit. There is a demand for easy credit because the Joneses were able to refinance and get money for a down payment on their new SUV!

If we stopped to think, really think, about how we live our lives and spend our money and leave a footprint in the sand we might rethink what we are doing. Perhaps the hapless shopper interviewed on the news this morning will go home and meditate on his comment. Maybe he and many like him across the nation will think about where their money went and why most of them can only afford to spend about $650 on their holiday gift shopping. Maybe some of them will think that they could make the holidays warm and bright in some other way than gift cards to Wal-Mart and Target. Maybe cash strapped shoppers will stick closer to home and shop their local downtown shops (if they still exist) before making the trip to a box store. But will it stick?

Well I don't know if any of it will stick. I don't know if anyone out there will ever realize that we need to consume less, save more, buy local, buy smaller, reuse what we have, repair what we already own, invest in our local economies, take part in rebuilding small businesses, and revive an America reeling from the morning after of its buy-bigger-buy-more consumption binge. Hopefully other cash strapped American Citizens out there will begin to think the same. and make the change.

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