HUNTSVILLE - When you meet Bob Burdett, you don't think "ecosensitive architecture patron." At T.J. Burdett & Sons Recycling, Burdett is the 29-year-old who operates the family business. A tattooed, second-generation Marine, he likes hunting deer and knows his way around heavy equipment. He spends a lot of time on the phone, doing deals with metal buyers in China and Turkey; when the market is volatile, he swoops in to make deals that bigger, less agile players can't.

Burdett is all about efficiency. A while back, for instance, he realized that instead of simply crushing a junked car into a block of scrap metal, the way that most recyclers do, he could make 30 percent more profit if his guys disassembled the junker "the way a redtail hawk eats a rabbit": first snatching out the motor and drive train to be sold separately, then shredding and baling the metal that remains. He is that most interesting of things: a junkman who hates waste.

And that, I think, was what drew him to Dan Phillips.

Tensions in art

At first glance, Phillips and Burdett have nothing in common. Phillips is more than twice as old as Burdett and weighs maybe half as much. His long gray ponytail and extravagant moustache hint at sensitivity and countercultural leanings. Trained as a dancer, for years he was a professor at Sam Houston State University; he still teaches a class in philosophy of dance, helping students understand the Nietzschean tensions inherent in art. But mainly these days, he's a builder who aims to change the way people think about buildings.

Phillips runs a for-profit group called Phoenix Commotion, and with his disciples, he builds gorgeous, super-cheap, one-of-a-kind houses made chiefly from objects otherwise destined for the dump: crooked lumber, bottle caps, picture-frame samples, mirror shards, brown paper bags, old park signs. Old lids from Pyrex cookware become round windows. Old wine corks become soft cork floors. License plates become roof shingles.

His method, he loves to explain, is to let the materials you have available dictate your plan, not the other way around. If life gives you twisty osage-orange branches, see whether you can incorporate them in a stair rail. If you have broken tiles, make a mosaic. Keep things from looking junky by incorporating them into a pattern. Lavish thoughtful labor on your building, not expensive materials.

Of the many funky houses that Phillips and his disciples had built - the Tree House, the License Plate House, the Victorian House, the Budweiser House - the Bone House was arguably his masterpiece. A butcher had offered him beef bones. "An elemental material," Phillips called bone. It resembled ivory, he thought. He didn't mind that it would creep some people out. He planned to rent the house, at low cost, to artists, and knew he'd have no trouble finding takers. And he loved the symbolism: His work with Phoenix Commotion was all about giving old materials new life, and what better material could he use than something that had so clearly once been alive?

He cut rectangles of rib bone to tile the kitchen counters. Other bits of bone punctuated a wood-mosaic floor. Rib bones became a balustrade; on the stair treads, cross-sections of bone were laid like round tiles. Outside, leg bones alternated with vertebrae, forming a pattern over the windows and under the eaves. Over one door arched a whale bone, a gift from a friend.

More Information Phoenix Commotion Dan Phillips leads monthly tours of Phoenix Commotion houses in Huntsville, including the rebuilt Bone House. The next tour will be at 2:30 p.m. Feb. 23. Tickets cost $10. The Burdett building is not on the tour. To register and for more information, go to phoenixcommotion.com and click "Events."

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The house was almost finished - everything done but spreading the gravel on the driveway - when it caught fire. Bone, it turned out, burns like wood, fast and hot. The outdoor fire pit survived, and a little of the raised walkway. Everything else was a charred mass.

Phillips called Burdett & Sons to help him clear the rubble. Burdett watched as Phillips scoured the blackened mess for anything that could be reused: melted power tools that could be refashioned into sculpture; blackened wine corks that artists could use to draw. Phillips figured that an oversize cedar beam, 12-by-12, would still be 11-by-11 after he planed away the char.

Huntsville is a small town, and the two men had known each other since Burdett was a kid. But in the wreckage of the Bone House, Burdett suddenly saw the artsy, philosophical older man as a kindred spirit: someone who hated waste as purely as he did.

"I asked him, 'You want to build us an office?' " Burdett recalls. "And Dan said, 'Hell, yes.' "

"Did I really say 'hell' "? Phillips asks, grinning up at Burdett.

"Hell, yes," says Burdett.

I want your can!

Phillips proposed a deal. Burdett would pay the bills, which would be no more than $100,000. Burdett would tell Phillips what configuration the office building should have, but otherwise, Phillips would have complete control of the design. Burdett, who was then working out of a dismal warehouse with crummy heat and A/C, agreed.

Burdett & Sons is located off the Interstate 45 access road, and for the two-story building's site, Phillips chose a spot as close as possible to the freeway, so that drivers whizzing past would be able to see Phoenix Commotion's wild creation. "I have an agenda," he says. And how better to promote his agenda than with a highly visible building at a recycling yard?

From the freeway these days, the first thing you see is the junk-filled mural on the office building's back. It's based on the billboard that's been Burdett & Sons' trademark for years: Uncle Sam, holding a beer can, declaring, "I want your can!" In the Phoenix Commotion version, designed by Phillips' apprentice Matt Gifford, a far stranger Uncle Sam holds a beer keg. His face is made of silvery scrap metal; his hair is a tangle of wire; his hat and suit are made of red, white and blue pieces of cars or signs. A cigarette juts from his mouth, and his metallic pointing finger juts out of the building. "T.J. Burdett & Sons Recycling" is spelled out in bits of metal flotsam and jetsam fished from the recycling yard - lots of hubcaps, lots of rust, lots of attitude.

Up close, the office building turns out to be far more than a base for the mural. From the front it looks as though the Big Bad Wolf has huffed and puffed and almost blown the thing over: The side walls bulge to the south, and the roof tilts and curves atop the building like a drunk's hat. From left to right, the roof of the porch slants downward at a rakish angle. You wait for the whole thing to lurch southward and collapse into a heap.

But it doesn't. The little house, like all of Phillips' buildings, is overbuilt, far stronger than it needs to be. Phillips says that the steel foundation, welded by Burdett's staff, "is strong enough to hold up the Eiffel Tower." The bulging, falling-down effect is a matter of specially designed trusses - cheap to build, and fun to look at.

Inside, the building's walls are straight, but even so, you feel vertigo; there's too much to look at. The front door leads into a soaring two-story space, its ceiling covered in iridescent CDs; it's what a disco ball must look like from the inside. The floors, a mosaic made of scrap marble and granite, include a big Texas lone star; more pieces of scrap marble and granite are stacked to form the wall between the main room and the offices. The wall behind the main room's coffee bar is covered in wide strips from an old T.J. Burdett & Sons sign, one rendered useless when Huntsville's area code changed. Burdett's dad had always thought they'd find a use for it.

The little bathroom's sink is made from a cattle watering basin; an old saxophone, mounted on the wall, dispenses soap. The walls of Bob's office are covered in old car radiators, fished out of the salvage yard. The radiators have the unexpected benefit of absorbing sound; in that office, you don't hear the heavy machines rumbling outside. Hood ornaments serve as doorknobs.

Nothing about the place looks efficient, but everything is. Phillips is careful about things such as insulation and sealing. He insists on Energy Star appliances. The marble wall and floor provide thermal mass. The units jutting from the building's windows aren't window-unit air conditioners, but efficient little heat pumps. And the building's windows, arranged in a bouncy pattern, are architect's samples with high-efficiency glass.

In the summer, Burdett says, he turns off the A/C when he leaves the office on Friday. And when he returns Monday, even if it's been over 100 degrees that weekend, the office will still be 80 degrees. He loves that efficiency. And he's proud, too, that the extraordinarily cool little building not only cost very little to build, but also came in far under budget. Burdett figures it cost $80,000, total - maybe less.

For that, Burdett got an office that he and his crew love, one that's a billboard for his business, a place he's proud to show off. Efficiency, it tells the world, doesn't have to be grim. Humor, beauty, originality: Those are all free.