 Architecture is presented in schools and to the world as a certain thing, a profession. It has changed radically from when in ancient times when the architects were damn near priests that aligned people with the stars and other phenomena, sun, moon, and so on. Architects became just kind of actually somebody else wrote an article and called them impotent products of the economy. And I kind of agreed with that. And there is an inertia that is keeping us from evolving. And the only way you can escape that inertia is to just step outside of it and not be a part of it. And I really wish some politicians would do that, let alone the architectural profession. But it didn't bother me because I just blew off the architectural profession really. And I have blown it off in my mind as a profession because it's not addressing the issues that we face. So I coined a new word called biotexture and I use that. I would say I'm a biotech more than an architect. Yeah, I'm an architect too, but I sometimes am embarrassed to even be a human and certainly am embarrassed to be an architect. We're in kind of a prototype house or ship that we've been working on for a few years. The object of this building is to illustrate, really illustrate everything we've been working in. And this home is the one that we are really trying to exemplify those things taken to the max to the point where a family of four could exist here without any outside input, almost like a survival situation. But we're trying to also at the same time illustrate that it's not a Spartan existence. This is a fairly cushy situation here, flat screen TV, internet and all kinds of food all over the place and comfortable and with plenty of electricity and water. So hot and cold running water. So we're trying to illustrate that that can happen. You don't have to make sacrifices to live in a carbon zero way. The nature of the construction, we beat earth into tires because rammed earth is dense mass and dense mass holds temperature. And so we needed to come up with a way to build out of dense mass and people do buildings with just rammed earth, but they can crack in an earthquake. It's not that strong, but when you put it in a steel-belted rubber casing, you have a thermal brick that is somewhat indestructible. I mean, if the earthquake happened, this mud could crack, but these tires, they're held together by friction anyway, so the wall can't structurally crack. It's phenomenal. And these things are indigenous to the entire planet. Every country has stockpiles of them. They don't know what to do with. So we're in its low-tech to beat dirt into them and you gather them. It's a fantastic way to build. If you came here from another planet and you had a brain, this is probably the way you'd start building, I think, rather than cutting down trees that produce oxygen for human bodies to live. So this is a brick, a tire brick wall, that's what it is, and we just infill the voids with mud and cans and bottles, and then we get it set up so that you can ultimately just mudplaster it with earth. And this is the nature of the structure of the whole building. This thing here is the waterboard. It is a series of filters and pumps that are gravity-fed by cisterns at either end of the house. The cisterns are filled up with water from the roof flow, and they gravity-feed this, and then this goes into the pressure tank and you end up with pressurized household running water that is conventional running water, really. Only it's rainwater. It's not full of fluoride and chlorine or hard water like coming from wells. It's not depleting aquifers, because aquifers are, there is a purpose for aquifers, and if you take all the aquifers away, damage does happen down into the bowels of the earth. So we're just taking water from the sky that falls on our roof, and we use it four times, so that makes this arid climate able to supply enough water for us to have a family of four living in a pretty big house. This is a bathroom. We wanted privacy but light, and so we take the bottles and cut the necks off of them, put them together and make bottle bricks, and it definitely is a stained glass effect. It's beautiful. Up here we have the plastic bottles done the same way. It creates a different texture. So the design really becomes a result of these products and finding the potential of these products. And then we're in here with the bathrooms always in these designs want to be close to the sewage treatment, which is filled with plants because it's a biology situation where the plants are the sewage treatment, and so you're always living with plants near the bathrooms, and then the sewage goes out and it's broken up into the black water of the toilet and the gray water of the sinks and the tub, and the gray water goes into the planters and it goes through and gets cleaned up through a series of planters, plant roots oxygenating it, and then we recollect it to flush the toilet with. So we're flushing the toilet with water we took a shower in yesterday, and then the toilet goes out to a conventional septic tank and the effluent from that goes into another rubber lined botanical cell like the gray water cells inside and is used for landscaping. So no drop of water ever leaves the home and the home is built to harvest and collect that water and we heat it from the sun, so we basically have fresh soft water from rain that is hot and cold. All over the world, they throw away these glass bottles and these aluminum cans. Now they're recycling some of each now, but not nearly enough, we're still able to find them, plenty of them actually, and some of the glass bottles they don't even recycle. And even if you do recycle aluminum, it takes the place of a fired brick that you would have to take a lot of energy to produce anyway so it still cancels itself out. And they're local rather than shipping fired bricks here, we just go out and gather cans that we use as bricks. We gather bottles that we use as bricks. And they're laid in a cement matrix just like bricks but it's more cement than bricks use, so ultimately it is a cement wall. These are a method of forming a cement wall. And then when you take them all the way to the finishes, we groom them out and they become a decorative finish if you want or in the cases of other walls, we just plaster over them. So they're a brick that another key factor there is that it's very low tech. You can learn to do all of these things in a very short period of time with very little skill or intelligence even. It puts these methods fit into the hands of the people a lot better than high tech tools and manufactured products that require a whole course on how to use them. I can teach people how to do this in 15 minutes. Like when I graduated from architectural school, sustainability was not really a word. Green wasn't a word. The movement of consciousness, let's say, toward a more sustainable and green and carbon-zero existence on this planet was a slow process. In the early 70s, when I had just gotten out of school, I looked around on my own and saw, well, we are throwing garbage out on streets and highways. The media was pointing that out. We are starting to have some oil issues and we had our first real energy crunch in the early 70s. So I looked at those things and started trying to incorporate solutions or addressing it, let's say, in the designs I was doing as a young architect and it pretty much took over my thinking because it kept going on. The problems kept getting worse and more problems came on board and we ended up 10 years ago or 15 years ago we realized we were doing carbon-zero housing. Not that we set out to do it, but it was just a logical response to the world around me led me there. Well, because they are led, really, an architect is a profession that you are trained in college to do and your profession in our world has to be your income. And just like politicians, if they take a risk, the kids don't get school clothes or they lose their house. So having your profession linked to your income and having your income linked to your sustainability, your livelihood, your sustenance, there is a recipe for disaster. One of the things we're trying to do now, now that we have, after four decades, discovered that we can make a home that is priced very much like conventional homes, only this home absolutely takes care of you in every way, we're trying to make that home not subject to the economy. And so, because we're seeing is that the economy can crash and people lose their homes. So we're going beyond architecture and beyond politics and we're trying to make sustenance something for people that is not subject to an economy or a profession and bring sustenance to people and sustenance is water and food and shelter, comfort, sanitation. We're trying to make that available worldwide. Well, what we have in this building is, we have what we call internal space that is buffered from external space outside by two layers of greenhouse, really. And so the plants, they can take more extremes in heat and cool than people. So the plants are subject to getting down to maybe 40 and up as high as 95 or so, whereas the people are not exposed to that, they're back in the internal space and they stay between 65 and 75. And so in a more extreme climates, we'll even go out with a third greenhouse. In fact, we kind of have that going on in the bedrooms here where there are three layers of glass between you and the outside. And so that's the, it's a concept in terms of retreating into internal space. And of course, I'd say in this climate, you know, 70% of the time, this is a living space comfort zone out here. But in times when it's a little extreme, you retreat to the other spaces. So you have square footed, some of which you don't use some time. Plants can use it all the time. It's justified because it's treating the sewage and it's growing food and it's a buffer zone for the internal space and it creates space for us to grow fish and so on. We're making, we use this as a nightly rental to educate people. And so we're playing with flowers as well and attractive household plants as well because they do put out oxygen and they do eat sewage. But we're moving into really focusing everywhere you see a plant that could be a food producing plant. So this is essentially a little farm and we're in our newer buildings we're accentuating the food production. And the idea here is that four people could stay alive. You wouldn't get fat, but we're starting to do it. We're playing it, we're doing it. We're, our office has lunches every day from the buildings. You know, totally from the buildings except for the salad dressing, let's say. They get cherry tomatoes and lettuce and grapes and all kinds of things and bananas and you can have a vegetarian diet from the food grown in the building which is also from the sewage system which is also in the buffer zone. And we're getting a protein by growing tilapia and a few days, a few weeks ago we just dropped a fishing bobber line in there and within two minutes caught a fish this big and cooked it up here and ate it with a bunch of garnish from the greenhouse and it was protein and we're raising them and we have babies now like this big and so we, you know, we got 50-60 tilapia in there right now and we have learned how to produce fish and we're going to introduce chickens and eggs now and basically there's a really cool thought I've had that makes some sense I think. Normally humans make housing and then they put a token beautiful plant in the corner somewhere and, you know, that really makes the place. Well, now in the future with things getting so scary about food I think people are going to be making housing for plants and if they're lucky they'll find room to throw up a hammock somewhere so they can live in there with the plants because plants are what's going to keep us alive on this planet and we're trying to teach ourselves the nature of plants. Well, I see, what do you call it, token gestures. I see lip service. I see rhetoric and certainly those things do cause tangible things to follow but right now I see architects paying lip service to green and carbon zero and I still see a lot of architects what I call is masturbation. They're making $60 million buildings out there that take $18,000 a month to operate. That's a crime to me. That's a crime. And it's not their fault just like it's because of the inertia. It's not anybody's one person's fault or you can't blame anybody. You just have to get away from it and do something different and what we did was we got away from it we're doing something different and they're coming to us. We're not sure if we're capable of taking the lead in this for anybody but ourselves but yeah, we got bananas here. Yeah, we got warmth. Yeah, we got power. Here's how we're doing it if you want to argue with that do it a different way but what I would say is do it. I don't care if you do it our way or not do it our way do it not with a nuclear power plant. Well, I've had that question asked a few times in different ways but what I would say for people that are entering this realm that is called architecture I would say study really hard on biology and physics and even chemistry and that understanding of those things will guide you toward making buildings that will sustain life on this planet.