Dan Phillips featured in Houston Chronicle today

[Living Paradigm]

See link or below:
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ent/arts/gray/6203300.html

You can see pictures of the Bone House on our website: www.livingparadigm.org

---from the Chronicle---
Lisa Gray: "This is the house that scraps built"

Dan Phillips, motioning toward a door he’s made from cedar scraps,
says something I never expected to hear from a builder: “I love
crooked.”

There was something wrong with every piece of wood in that perfectly
functional door, he brags. Some pieces were warped. Others, left in
the sun, had turned gray. Those blemishes were why lumberyards were
willing to give Phillips the wood free, to be used in the ultra-low-
cost houses that his little company, The Phoenix Commotion, builds in
Huntsville.

The house he’s working on now — his 12th in an oeuvre that’s garnered
national attention — is made almost entirely from materials that had
been bound for the trash. There are leftovers from other builders’
projects. Bits of broken mirrors. Wine corks and beer-bottle caps. T-
shirts. Wood scraps. Signs discarded by a state park. Brown paper. And
bones: beef bones, deer bones, even a whale rib.

By all rights, the place ought to look a mess, like “a slum
admixture,” in Dan’s words, “or something out of Sanford and Son.” But
it’s not a mess at all. It is strange, like nothing I’ve ever seen
before. But it’s also beautiful.

The secret, Dan says, is design and philosophy.

Which, like his materials, are free.

“You know The Birth of Tragedy by Nietzsche?” Dan asks.

It’s another sentence I never expected to hear from a builder. I nod
uncertainly.

“You know how he described the two strains of culture? There’s the
Apollonian culture, where everything is crisp, tidy and perfect. And
there’s the Dionysian culture, where everything is passionate and
organic.

“If an Apollonian is hanging a picture, he gets out his level and his
measuring tape and precisely centers the picture on the wall. If a
Dionysian is hanging a picture, he takes the picture, holds it up to
the wall, and goes, “Hmmm. Does this look about right?”

“Our building industry is entirely Apollonian. Architects pre-think
their design, specifying these ideal materials and aiming to create
these idealized shapes. They’re at a disadvantage. They work off in an
office, drawing blueprints. They can’t get feedback from the materials
and let the designs evolve.”

Dan’s houses blend Apollo and Dionysus. He starts, like a good
Dionysian, with whatever materials he has at hand: old license plates,
maybe, rocks or tree branches. Then, to keep those whacked-out
materials from looking trashy, he tames them with two Apollonian
concepts: unity and repetition.

Recently, a butcher offered to give him as many beef bones as he
wanted. Dan likes bone — it’s elemental, he says — and he recognized
that beef bones could be treated like ivory. Bone, he decided, would
be the motif he’d repeat , the concept that defines his project. The
Bone House was born.

He tiled the kitchen counters with rectangles cut from rib bone. Bits
of bone decorate the wood mosaic floor. Ribs form the balustrade on an
upstairs balcony, and in the kitchen a jawbone with two gold teeth
serves purely as a decorative flourish. Cross sections look like round
tiles atop the stair treads. Outside, leg bones alternate with
vertebrae over windows and under eaves.

Repetition, he notes, is key, but it’s not difficult.

“If I have 100 of ‘these’ and 300 of ‘those,’ I have the possibility
of repeating,” Dan writes on his Web site. “It makes no difference
what ‘these’ and ‘those’ are. I have used hickory nuts, aluminum cans,
chicken eggs, branches, beer cartons, soup-can labels, tile shards,
broken concrete and the whole range of structurally oriented
materials.”

To create a pattern, he instructs, simply take a hundred of something
— anything. Sit down with them. And play.

“Texture and repetition create pattern,” he says. “Texture and
repetition create pattern.

“Texture and repetition create pattern.”

He’s happy to share this advice. He wants the world to adopt his
ecosensitive philosophies, so he offers advice on his Web site. He
trains unskilled laborers so they can go out and build like he does.

And he’s particularly thrilled that architect Amanda Tullos, of Living
Paradigm, plans to build in his manner in Houston’s Fifth Ward.

When you’ve got something wild and good, Dan thinks, you’d best repeat
it.