Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff | Video on TED.com

I came across this entertaining and insightful TED talk today: Dan Phillips Creative Houses from Reclaimed stuff:

Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff | Video on TED.com

The images of Dans work as a builder are of some very beautiful, creative and very inspiring homes made from around 70% - 80% of reclaimed materials.

The talk is not so much about using reclaimed materials in quirky one off homes but the underlying reasons as to why we don’t and why we have a sterile mono-cultural mass produced homes that we can no longer afford and that produce vast amounts of waste in production and running.

Through apperceptive mass, Neitchze, Satre, Plato, status and Maslovs hierarchy his central theme is that of the Apollonian Dionysian conflict. Premeditated perfection reason versus spontaneous organic emotion. The mainstream follows the Apollonian model. Standardised materials create a false perception of perfection which is intern demanded by consumers in a self reinforcing circle which creates enormous levels of waste.

Instead of catering to this expectation of perfection Dan argues that we need to embrace a more dionysian perspective and learn to love those kinks, bulges, cracks, sags, knots, warps inherent in most materials and make them feature. And to do this we need to accept that failure is ok.