How Michael Reynolds Built a House with Coke Cans

This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 249, ‘Object Lessons’

In his own telling, American architect Michael Reynolds had the revelation in 1970 after watching Walter Cronkite on CBS Evening News. ‘They were talking about beer and soda cans being thrown all over the countryside,’ he notes in Journey: Part One (2008). ‘They predicted a garbage problem in the future.’ The same broadcast reported on the clearcutting of a forest in the Pacific Northwest for timber to meet housing demands. ‘What if we used what society discards,’ thought Reynolds, ‘to make the things we need?’ American popular discourse in the United States had primed Reynolds for this breakthrough. News stories throughout the 1960s exposed the nuclear fallout in the American Midwest from weapons-testing, the rivers and lakes filling with industrial pollutants and the major cities blanketed in thick, noxious smog. Concern for the environment crescendoed and, on the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970, 20 million people across the US attended rallies, teach-ins and marches.

Reynolds graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1969, at the crests of the anti-war, civil-rights and environmental movements. ‘Architecture as it stood then was worthless,’ he said in Garbage Warrior, a 2007 documentary about his life’s work. ‘It had nothing to do with the planet and barely anything to do with people and what they needed.’ Architecture, he thought, had the power to shape humanity’s course towards a continuously thriving future but, instead, it perpetuated the status quo, ‘taking us where we don’t need to go’. In 1971, aged 26, Reynolds bought an old barn on 18 hectares of land in Cañon, New Mexico. He moved in with his first wife, Susan. Needing more space after the couple’s son was born, and inspired by Cronkite’s report, Reynolds filled wood-framed structures with beer bottles and cement mortar. Laid sideways with their necks extending outward, the bottles formed walls that, when sunlight streamed through, resembled stained glass in shades of coffee and olive.

In 1972, Reynolds started building a house entirely out of beer-can ‘bricks’, made by sandwiching a pair of horizontally oriented cans between two vertical ones. On either side of the horizontal cans are additional, flattened cans for weatherproofing. Holding everything together are wire cinctures around the top and bottom rims. The year he moved to Cañon, Reynolds filed a patent application for ‘building blocks of empty cans’ where he described the attributes of his invention. By his claims, his can-blocks have a high mechanical strength, yet are lightweight, making them cheap to obtain and transport, and quick to lay. Given their irregular surfaces, they can be stacked and connected with a conventional mortar joint. Most importantly, aside from the wire fasteners, the blocks are made entirely of waste material. With these blocks, Reynolds eliminated the concept of garbage not only in his practice, but in his worldview. What was once disposed of is now raw material to make something else: industry castoffs reimagined as a natural resource. ‘Now,’ he wrote in Journey, ‘it is humanity that is becoming the nature of the planet.’

If Reynolds’s invention anticipated our current discourse on circular economy and upcycling, he would likely admit that it was as much a result of environmentalism as it was of prophetic vision. In the early 1970s, Reynolds would spend nights on the roof of his two-storey beer-can extension gazing up at the moon. There, he claimed wizards would appear with messages about mind-expanding ways to perceive the world more fully. One advocated for something called ‘spherical vision’, which reimagines a person’s field of vision as omniscient rather than directed, their point of view infinitely multiplied around an object to create a spherical field of perspectives.

For Reynolds, looking at something is a form of interaction or engagement, and doing so simultaneously from all sides and distances is akin to a physical and spiritual entwinement with the surrounding world. We are what’s around us. In this way, a brick made of cans is not just a novel aggregate of material, but signals a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and their lived environment. ‘We are talking about cosmic travel,’ he noted in Journey, ‘into a rock; into the body of a bird; into the mind of a human; into the depths of the universe’.

This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘Waste Wizard’

The Earthship Visitor Centre can be visited at earthship.com

^{Main image: Michael Reynolds, Thumb House (detail), 1971, archival photograph. Courtesy: Michael Reynolds Archive and Earthship Biotecture, New Mexico}