Dan Phillips is a designer/builder working in Huntsville, Texas, who, working with his wife Marsha, builds low-income housing, with unskilled workers, from free, salvage and recycled materials.  Their company is recently trying to move into a commercial market for clients who have a taste for recycling and social entrepreneurship.  Having been associated with the construction industry in many capacities for over twenty years, he is now concentrating on using one social problem to solve another, with his recycled housing initiative, The Phoenix Commotion. 

Experience in his business of art and antique restoration has served him well in the reclamation of construction waste in fabricating attractive, energy-efficient houses.  Fine Homebuilding, People, The New York Times, Natural Home, Houston House and Home, Change Magazine, Reason, and many others – as well as CBS, ABC, HGTV, CNN, PBS, TNN, The Texas Country Reporter, and The Discovery Channel – have all featured his projects in their respective media, in addition to television and print media around the world. He regularly lectures for civic groups, at regional, national, and international conferences, and at universities, including A&M School of Architecture, University of Texas – Austin School of Architecture, University of Kansas School of Architecture, Boston College, Austin Community College, Yale University and Sam Houston State University.  His website,www.phoenixcommotion.com, includes discussion of his philosophy with numerous photographs. 

Spring, 2012, he lectured at the 9th International Convention on Architecture in Budapest.  He was awarded the 2003 Award for the Most Innovative Housing Model Worldwide by the Institute for Social Invention in London.  In 2009 he was awarded the Beacon of Light Award by the National Interfaith Council.  And in 2010 he received the Edison Green Award in New York, sponsored by Rutgers University, and the Environmental Excellence Award sponsored by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.   The background leading to his current activity is eclectic. 

He variously rode Brahma bulls, worked in intelligence in West Berlin during the cold war, served on the dance faculty of Sam Houston State University for ten years, and has a number of degrees.   His wife, Marsha, has recently retired as an art teacher.  Their son, Ian, flies an F-16 for the Air Force, and their daughter, Phoebe, is a patent attorney in Grand Rapids, Michigan.  They have four grandchildren.PhoenixCommotion.comDan Phillips at ZWIA14Zero Waste Canada Conference Nanaimo BC Oct 2nd 2014