House made from trash

By PENELOPE GREEN
JOSHUA TREE, Calif.

ON the front porch table was a pile of rocks and blue cast-glass nipples fitted with aluminum collars that looked like the tops of space-age baby bottles. Bullet holes puckered the glass of several window panes. A swing rigged from a galvanized water tank groaned in the dusty wind. And Suzie, a dog who splits her time between this property and a neighbor’s, tipped her food out of its cast-iron skillet and thrust a wet nose into a visitor’s hand.

“I like stuff that has a patina, and that you can drive a hand-truck into,” said Randy Polumbo, who owns the house, which also has a bathroom ceiling made from ammunition cases and a loft railing made of rusty mattress frames. (“Rust never sleeps,” a sign tucked into a shrine-cum-garden of cactuses, rocks and old handguns observed.) Mr. Polumbo, a sculptor with a day job as a high-end contractor in Manhattan, is part of the most recent wave of artists for whom Joshua Tree’s cinematic bleakness and fringe Americana are aesthetic catnip.

Cleaved by the Twentynine Palms Highway, the town’s lunar landscape — Flintstonian boulders set off by the curious shapes of the Joshua Tree, the yucca relative from which this town takes its name — features a local architectural vernacular of midcentury stone-and-wood shacks.

These were embellished in the 1970s by off-the-grid hippies and survivalists, who supplied add-ons like rooms made from half a geodesic dome or a Quonset hut. They were further refined by contemporary artists like Andrea Zittel in the 1990s, as well as newer pioneers like Mr. Polumbo, who began to use the town’s end-of-days vocabulary in their own work.
Mr. Polumbo’s handmade “trash house,” as he describes it, fits easily into this environment. But it couldn’t be more antithetical to the sleek perfectionism of the rarefied Manhattan environments that his company, 3-D Laboratory, has made for architects like Santiago Calatrava, Maya Lin and Rafael Viñoly.

It amuses Mr. Polumbo — “A LEED-accredited professional” in his day job, he said, referring to the construction industry’s standard for measuring building sustainability — to note that back in New York, the phrase “green construction” generally refers to the latest technologies and costs a fortune.

“Out here,” he pointed out, “people have been off the grid and making do in their bootleg houses for decades.”
Mr. Polumbo recalled a neighbor’s recipe for making hot water: paint an oil drum black, leave it outside and run a hose from it. “And what could be greener,” he continued, “than building out of trash, as they’ve been doing here since the ’70s?”

The other day, Ann Magnuson, the....

Aside the fact that you can save from the materials in making a house, like a normal house, the house of trash is a unique one..people may appreciate it, everyone all over the world, i hope i can have the chance to see even just a picture of the house..thanks!!its a very creative way to build a home..