But Mr. Reynolds' time has come. Dozens of his hippie houses are recognized today as the ultimate in recycling — for using garbage as insulation within their walls.

All of this is told in the documentary feature film Garbage Warrior, which played at this fall's Vancouver International Film Festival. And his house designs are shown in the timely exhibition 1973: Sorry, Out of Gas at Montreal's Canadian Centre for Architecture, which documents architectural responses to 1970s oil crisis.

Soon after the newly minted architect moved from Ohio to the sunny southwest, Mr. Reynolds tried embedding discarded car tires in walls; the rubber proved a more efficient insulator than straw. He soon found an even better insulation material: polycarbonate water bottles. Emptied of Evian, they are laid empty and capped, in rows like wine bottles, their ends sealed in wet concrete that forms walls.

For a warm but high-altitude climate like New Mexico's, these bottle walls provide all the insulation needed. The designer then experimented with bottles filled with water that would soak up solar heat during the day, then radiate it back out during cool desert nights.

When some of his increasingly well-heeled clients objected to the use of plastic in their walls, he substituted multi-coloured glass bottles lifted from landfills. The walls glow like stained glass windows, and their reuse saves the energy that would have been expended to melt them down for recycling.