Monica Chen - TED talk featuring Dan Phillips

Dan Phillips: Creative houses from reclaimed stuff~

After watching several thought-provoking TED talks from various areas of expertise from using mushroom polymers as an alternative to the harmful effects of plastic, to being exposed to the majesty of our world’s oceans and the horrors being afflicted upon its marine life, I ended up choosing one pertaining to architecture. Although I am still very much undecided on what I would like to study in college or the career I want to pursue, architecture has always been one of my, if you will, random, interests. Usually when someone brings up “architecture,” they think of perfect angles, symmetrical shapes, and practical styles. Yet there are those who break out of that mode of expectation and instead opt for uniqueness, which is why my speaker, Dan Phillips, and his message resonated so strongly with me. His specific talk is titled “Creative houses from reclaimed stuff” – essentially what he does is salvage all kinds of materials that were headed to the landfill because they were deemed “waste” and use them to build low-cost sustainable housing. These houses are custom-tailored to the eventual owners of each house, but in of themselves they are all individually wildly creative and usually thematic. Disturbed by the irony of landfills choked with building materials and yet a lack of affordable housing, in his talk Phillips describes what causes waste in the building industry in an attempt to help the audience better understand why he does what he does.

Among his many points, he expounds on the natural human tendency to want to maintain consistency and a familiar continuity, as well as the conflict between Apollonian perspective (premeditated and flawless) and Dionysian perspective (organic and intuitive). To Phillips, almost anything discarded and durable is potential building material: “It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a complete set of anything because repetition creates pattern, repetition creates pattern, repetition creates pattern.” Decorations that adorn his creations include hickory nuts, chicken eggs, branches, bones, bottle caps, broken tiles, and such, where almost everything was previously unwanted because things mismatched, were warped, or had blemishes. A lot of problems in the building industry are rooted in human behavior. According to Jean-Paul Sartre’s “Being and Nothingness,” human beings act differently when they know they are alone than when they know someone else is around. Because of this, we are constantly unconsciously living up to other people’s expectations of how we should live our lives, something that Phillips is distraught over when he sees it in the building industry as evidenced by all the monotonous and woefully mundane urban subdivisions. He is dedicated to sustaining the environment by forging his own path of architectural style that encompasses originality, passion, spontaneity, and an unwavering work ethic.

Now 66 and still going strong, Dan Phillips has had an astonishingly varied life, working as an intelligence officer in the Army, a college dance instructor, an antiques dealer, and a syndicated cryptogram puzzle maker. His many life aspirations only affirms his personality of being willing to try different things while putting just as much effort into each endeavor that he pursues. Phillips holds several academic degrees including a doctorate in education, and is a Professor Emeritus at Sam Houston State University. In 1996, he began his cause as a designer and builder based in Huntsville, Texas. He and his wife Marsha mortgaged their home to finance their own socially-conscious company, The Phoenix Commotion, a small local building initiative created to prove that constructing homes with recycled and salvaged materials has a viable place in the building industry. No two are alike due to the myriad of materials used, so there is an artistic element that makes these homes truly one-of-a-kind. Entirely unconventional, The Phoenix Commotion requires the homeowner to be involved with the planning and construction of his or her own home. The result is a person who is empowered, not only by the useful knowledge of building skills, but by the opportunity to become part of a community as a vested participant.

Phillips’ mesmerizing and eye-opening talk was genuinely inspiring for me in that it not only made me think about the boundless unnecessary waste of our daily lives, but also his resolute tenacity in defying the norm to work towards a better change in the world. His line of work allows him to take pride in doing his part in protecting Earth’s resources and preserving that spark of human creativity slowly being extinguished. Phillips said that his biggest reward was giving less-fortunate people the opportunity to own a home and watching them develop a sense of satisfaction and self-determination in the course of building it. As an artistic and open-to-many-possibilities type of person, I find his work fascinating and would be interested in being able to harness my creativity while also being able to work with my hands and contribute to environmental conservation. Because I am a junior, I still cannot clearly envision who I will be in the future, but Mr. Dan Phillips has definitely given me a lot to think about, especially his closing statement: “What we really need to do is reconnect with who we really are,” which in turn reminded me of Gandhi’s “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not every man’s greed.” One man’s trash is indeed another man’s treasure.