A House for $501.70 was. On March 15, 1976, under the horrified gaze of students, faculty, and campus police, the "tube house"t was consumed by fire. However unsuccessful these earliest experiments mig. ht have seemed/the small "can house" was also pul venzed by vandals in due course), their extremely low cost as buildings had already occasioned comment.J There had, of course, been no paid labor on either pro- ject, butas a result of the use of very common wastes the material cost of each had been about a dime a square foot at a time when conventional house construction was running at $25 or more. Furthermore, as I tirelessly pro- claimed, our patient searches for material suppliers had uncovered enough for a hundred such structures without moving more than a couple of miles from the center of the campus. Every week the 7-roy Tirnes-Recorddumped 150 newsprint cores in sizes ranging from 60 inches to 28 inches in length, and we used only forty to make a roof truss capable of covering 60 square feet. In the early weeks of 1976 we improved on this by developing a "stretched" truss spanning 16 feet, which, with a spacer section either side of it, could cover 200 square feet of floor space with only sixty tubes. The supply situation with other wastes was equallypromising. The Rensselaer food outlets on campus gen-erated about 600 No. 5 and No. 10 cans every week.Steel strapping was being thrown away by Star Textiles