unusual homes and how to make them

I read National Geographic World ( magazine for pre-teens) as a child and I clearly remember a home built of tires and pounded earth.  The finished home didn't look like tires as it had some coating and inside cladding but it did look great -the walls were very organic and nothing was straight.

The Ekinoid Project homes look very different but also are similar in that they look quite different from normal homes as well.

Other homes:
Rammed Earth and tires/ cans, Hexayurt, and my favorite, the plastic bottle floating island.

When well-done, they look great and are certainly eye-catching.  I don't think they can live up to their hype though.  The Ekinoid home is built as a sphere for better insulation by volume, but I don't buy it because so much space is wasted in a sphere. Few people want to walk on the sloping sides of even the bottom eighth, nor can they use, except as a crawl-space attic, the edges on top.  The project calls for the home to be 'off the grid' but again, I don't know how easy that is to do.  I do like them, though.

To my mind, environmentally friendly housing needs to be multi-family housing.  Perhaps a standard box with four families each using a corner and two outside walls but having an open space interior.  The unconventional aspect would be the uses the open space would be for.  Each family would have privacy in their nearly dorm-style apartment, but share a common cooking and recreation area.  The savings would come from shared appliances,  a one big fridge rather than four medium sized ones.

Oh, how to make an Ekinoid home?  I don't know.  If you have ideas, visit their site (link is above) and read the criteria they have.