EARTHSHIPS MAKE A LANDING IN THE HIGHLANDS

Eind augustus 2003 vertrok een groep Rotterdammers op initiatief van de stichting Owaze met financiele steun vanuit het Rotterdams Milieucentrum naar het Schotse plaatsje Kinghorn (net boven Edinburgh).

Hier op de heuvels van ‘Craigencalt Farm’ wordt het eerste Earthschip in Europa gebouwd. Het Rotterdamse ‘bouwteam’ leerde hier de grondbeginselen van de bouw van Earthships.
De bouw van het Schotse Earthship starte in juli 2002 op initiatief van Paula Cowie van de Schotse stichting Duurzame Wijkinitiatieven (SCI = Sustainable Communities Initiatives).
De Amerikaanse uitvinder van de Earthships de biotect Michel Reynolds en zijn team was bij de aanvang van dit avontuur aanwezig om letterlijk de funderingen te leggen en de Schotten te ondersteunen met tekst en uitleg.

In het artikel in The Sunday Times van 29 september wordt initiatiefneemster Paula Cowie geinterviewd.

Sunday Times (GB) september 29 2002

Forget Spaceship Earth.
How about some Earthship space?
Ellie Carr discovers the environmentalists watching their waste to build eco-friendly houses.

Earth-packed tyres and aluminium cans make an unlikely “des tres”. But these are the face and foundations of Scotland’s first ‘Earthship’. Earthship Fife (naam van de provincie in Schotland, red.), cut into the hillside of Craigencalt Farm, is among the UK’s first examples of a type of sustainable housing initially pioneered 30 years ago in the unforgiving landscape of New Mexico by the American architect Michael Reynolds as a way of utilising waste.

Sci – Scotland

Earthship Biotecture

Craigencalt Ecology Centre (CEC)

Earthship Brighton

2012 Architecten

Paula Cowie, the women responsible for bringing Earthships to Scotland, stumbled across her first construction of this kind when she was a student holidaying in Mexico. A quick trawl around thewww.earthship.org website should reveal to the most cynical why she was smitten.
Build in keeping with their desert surroundings, these often split-level homes with their warren like sequences of rooms (called Us after theire shape), curvaceous terracotta-coloured walls and sunken baths studded with mosaic tiles have much a whiff of exotica as environmentalism about them.
While they have potential as low cost housing, some, like the 2,5 million euro Earthship owned by the American actor Dennis Weaver, are virtually tyre mansions.

Cowie discovered there were more than 1000 of these homes fashioned form recycled tyres and cans across the globe.