Dan Phillips
Dan Phillips
Dan Phillips is an American designer and builder from Texas. He is the founder and face of Phoenix Commotion, a construction company established in 1997. Phoenix Commotion focuses on designing Eco-friendly homes for low-income individuals and families such as struggling artists and single mothers. The company’s goals include reducing landfill burdens through the use of excess and recyclable materials; providing low-income housing through selection of cheap materials and labor; and allowing opportunities for the unemployed by training unskilled workers...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionDesigner
CountryUnited States of America
Building codes are a good thing. People who throw rocks at inspectors are being naive. It's a lot like police officers; we want them around unless they stop us for a ticket. It's the same with inspectors.
People learn from each other, ... You hear students all the time comparing their experiences in India, Amsterdam and Spain . It opens people's eyes to the world and fosters conversation and dialogue.
We're going to do some things to help with that.
We love the Padres, they're a good team. Hey, nevermind the records, they're in the post-season and they have a shot. The pressure is all on the Cardinals,
We just love baseball. We cheer when the other team makes a great play. We don't care. In St. Louis, it's all about baseball. And when it's over for the year, now that's something to be sad about.
For centuries, building materials were free. You want to build a house, you cut down some trees. But we haven't been thinking about the cost to the planet.
Look at kids playing with blocks. I think it's in everyone's DNA to want to be a builder.
I was a dancer of no repute. But dance taught me a lot. You walk into a dance studio knowing you have to walk out with a dance. You improvise.
I decided to set out to prove that you could make a reasonable living building for the poor using recycled materials and only hiring unskilled labor.
Where do you get lumpy tiles? Well, of course, you don't. But I get a lot of toilets, and so you just dispatch a toilet with a hammer, and then you have lumpy tiles.
We have cultural expectations that everyone needs a dining room, yet they're only used three times a year. But if I put a bone handle on the door of an upper-end brick home, I'm making an outlandish statement.
The first cause of waste is probably even buried in our DNA. Human beings have a need for maintaining consistency of the apperceptive mass. What does that mean? What it means is, for every perception we have, it needs to tally with the one like it before, or we don't have continuity, and we become a little bit disoriented.
Human beings are a social species. We like to hang together in groups, just like wildebeests, just like lions. Wildebeests don't hang with lions because lions eat wildebeests. Human beings are like that. We do what that group does that we're trying to identify with.
People have been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years: using whatever is available to build shelter. If you ponder what could be used, then building materials are everywhere.