Grass House

The first structure with straw bale walls to receive a building permit in the United States sits at the edge of a field on a 130-acre parcel of hilltop land in East Meredith, New York, a rural Catskills hamlet. The low, gray house, completed in 1989, has two-foot-thick walls, a stucco-like concrete exterior, and a small central courtyard that separates a pair of spare and intensely quiet rooms. It must have been well suited to its former use as a meditation retreat.

This straw bale structure and two others nearby, including a flat-roofed contemporary home still under construction, are the work of Clark Sanders, a Cornell-trained veterinarian turned straw bale builder. Sanders has become something of a straw-bale guru to a new generation of builders in the East Meredith area, where straw bale construction has taken off. His output - six homes built over the past twenty years - may sound underproductive, until you see them. His straw bale masterpiece, a 2,500-square-foot, two-story gabled home set on 45 acres, which he sold as a vacation home to a couple from Manhattan, contains rounded plaster windowsills and walls, salvaged barn timbers, a curving mud-and-straw staircase, and earthen floors. Entirely handmade, it took Sanders five years to build. “To me,” he says, “a house is just a sculpture that you can live in.”

Sanders’s technique, first revived by a small group of amateur builders in the 1970s and ’80s and much the same now as it was three decades ago, involves stacking straw bales like blocks to form walls and then plastering them. His old-school approach seems to reinforce stereotypes about straw bale construction - namely, that it is a rural and alternative practice, perhaps a bit hippie. But in some spots around the country, the use of straw bales is rapidly becoming a credible niche in the mainstream construction and design industries. Advocates say straw insulation is incredibly energy-efficient, and rising energy prices make it an attractive alternative to fiberglass and Sheetrock. Although questions about mold, insects, rodents, and fire are inevitable, skepticism about the practice (and the relentless Three Little Pigs jokes) has subsided now that straw bales are showing up on the pages of Dwell magazine and in buildings ranging from transit facilities to schoolhouses. You might expect straw bale veterans to sit back and survey the scene like proud parents, but a tough road lies ahead: city buildings are the final frontier for this greenest of green building methods, and even some of the movement’s founders wonder whether straw bale construction is reaching its natural limits. 

Seeking Shelter

The first Americans to use bales as building blocks were homesteaders in the Sandhills region of Nebraska, a barren, treeless plain spotted with grassy meadows. The popularization of the mechanical hay press in the late 1800s serendipitously offered an expedient way to cut hay into building material, which homesteaders may have turned to out of desperation. “Winter comes early there, and it comes fast,” says Judy Knox, a straw bale builder who has traveled to Nebraska to research these early structures. “You can only imagine them looking at a stack of meadow hay bales as the only shelter in sight.”

Most structures were intended as temporary shelter, but early builders discovered that hay houses were warm in the winter, cool in the summer, and durable (tornado-proof, even). Several plastered specimens of the 60 or so Sandhills structures still stand, and in two cases are still in use. (The first hay bale building on record, an un-plastered, one-room schoolhouse built around 1886, was not as fortunate, and was eaten by cows.) But in spite of its charms and performance, hay bale building never entered the local building vernacular. When the railroad came to the Sandhills in the late 1920s, bearing lumber and other building supplies, bale building all but disappeared.

The technique would likely have stayed extinct if not for a TV personality and folklorist from Nebraska, Roger Welsch, who in 1973 published an essay on the Sandhills houses in Shelter, a book on alternative and indigenous building methods. The obscure essay inspired a smattering of readers, including a young Clark Sanders, to begin experimenting with bale building (most experimenters used straw, however, a more durable and less leafy byproduct of grain harvests). Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, other articles on the technique appeared in niche publications such as Fine Homebuilding, Mother Earth News, and the Permaculture Drylands Journal. Enthusiasts remained a small lot until 1991, when the New York Times published an article on the construction of a $10,000 straw bale home in Tucson, Arizona. The article mentioned Judy Knox and Matts Myhrman, founders of a straw bale consulting company, and within a few days they were so overwhelmed with phone calls that they switched to an unlisted number. “Straw bale empowered people to begin building, because people can imagine stacking wood blocks,” says Sanders.

Straw bale buildings are either structures in which bale walls are load-bearing, or the far more prevalent “infill” structures in which the bales surround conventional wood or aluminum studs. Both methods are relatively user-friendly. In most cases, bales are cut with chainsaws and stacked, smoothed with weed-whackers and other tools, covered with a metal mesh lathe, and then finished in cement-based stucco or earth- or lime-based plasters. The plastering technique - far easier (and less toxic) than installing fiberglass insulation and Sheetrock - typically results in noticeably rounded walls, doorframes, and windowsills, giving straw bale buildings a pre-industrial look similar to adobe, often described as “handmade.”

The aesthetic attracts most people at first, but the energy-efficiency clinches it. At 18 or 24 inches thick, plastered straw bale walls insulate 50 to 100 percent more effectively than fiberglass, and many owners report that straw bale homes are comfortable without heat or air conditioning, even in harsh climates. Aside from the substantial energy savings that can accrue over the life of a building, straw bales are, at $2.75 to $7 a bale, also much cheaper than conventional building materials. Adding to their earth-friendliness, straw bales are a salvaged waste product - American farmers burn or scatter millions of tons of straw in their fields each year - and compared to milled lumber or Sheetrock, they have what is known as a low “embodied energy” - that is, they require very little energy to produce.

During the 1990s the technique spread steadily among owner-builders through word-of-mouth and straw bale workshops, especially in the Southwest, because of its adobe tradition and dry climate. Moisture is the archenemy of straw bale structures, but mass trial-and-error eventually produced construction methods for all climates. (Case studies regularly show up in the pages of a quarterly journal, The Last Straw, and on various active Listservs. The evolution of straw bale building is sometimes described as an “open-source” process, and not coincidentally, the popularization of straw bale and the Internet overlapped.) By 2000, straw bale building had made its way into nearly every part of the country, including wet and cold climates like the Pacific Northwest, New England, and Alaska. Although confirmed figures for the number of straw bale structures in the U.S. today are hard to come by, builders estimate that there are as many as 10,000.

Making Hay Less Hippie

Since its inception, the straw bale community has remained small, tight-knit, and markedly collegial. The biannual International Straw Bale Building Conference, held last September at a summer camp in Ontario, drew fewer than 200 people and featured a straw bale “Olympics,” in addition to lectures and workshops. “It’s a real warm, fuzzy community,” says Bruce King, a California engineer and the editor of the recently published Design of Straw Bale Buildings. “It’s like a religious cult, without the religion. And that quality still lives, even though there are a lot of people doing straw bale who are missing out on the fun part.”

As the technique comes of age, however, it has filtered into the professional world. The demand for custom homes (mansions, in some cases) has especially taken off, and many builders have hung out a shingle in response. But residential construction is not the only market. Since the 1990s, straw bale building has been used in stores, wineries, a post office, even an Army building at Fort Hood in Texas. In the past few years, straw bale buildings of unprecedented sizes have gone up, including schools in four states; several municipal buildings; a two-story natural food store in Helena, Montana; and a 21,000-square-foot church in the city of El Centro, California, which required about 4,500 bales. Many of their architects work for large, mainstream firms and are using the technique for the first time.

Besides rising energy costs, heightened alarm over climate change and increasing mainstream interest in green building have spurred much of the new interest in straw bale. Private institutions and public entities are opting for - and in some cases, mandating - sustainable and energy-efficient buildings, certified by the U.S. Green Building Council. Santa Clarita, California, for instance, a city of about 170,000 in L.A. County, identified sustainability as a core civic principle, and, setting its sights on a platinum (the highest) rating from the USGBC, designed a $26 million transit maintenance facility as a showcase for sustainable design. The facility, which opened in fall 2005, has a 25,000-square-foot administration building with straw bale walls, along with more high-tech features such as an under-floor HVAC system, waterless urinals, and solar panels). The firm that designed the building, Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum, is among the world’s largest.

The Friends Community School, a 28,000-square-foot pre-K-8 school in Greenbelt, Maryland, will become the largest straw bale building in the country when it opens this spring, developed out of similar principles. The school leadership wanted their new building to speak to the community’s “commitment to stewardship and sustainability,” says the building’s architect, Peter Doo. After weighing several sustainable building technologies, they settled on straw bale construction. That required some research, since neither Doo nor his firm, Baltimore’s Hord Coplan Macht, had worked with straw bale before. “When we started looking at this as a construction type, we called insurance companies, we called building code officials, we got on the Internet,” Doo recalls, “and to our surprise, we found that [straw bale] was being institutionalized.”

Veterans like David Eisenberg in Tucson had been working for more than a decade to write straw bale building codes into the books of cities and counties across the nation (California, in the mid-1990s, passed the first statewide straw bale building code). King and others, meanwhile, had conducted numerous fire and structural tests - which straw bale aced. (Hord Coplan Macht eventually brought King and Eisenberg on as consultants.) At the same time, the straw bale community’s open-source process had evolved the technique to a point that satisfied most building officials’ and insurers’ questions about mold and rodents.

Jeff Roberts, an architect with Lucchesi Galati in Las Vegas, oversaw the design of two straw buildings of more than 8,000 s quare feet at the Desert Living Center, a vast complex of museums and gardens just west of downtown Las Vegas. He is now something of an evangelist for the cause. “I don’t see how [straw bale] cannot become more mainstream,” he says. His firm later designed a straw bale building for a high school in Las Vegas that won an award from the American Institute of Architects.

Builders have already seen a sea change. Benchmark Development in Northern California began building custom straw bale homes in 1993 and now uses more than 30,000 bales a year. Russ Tucker, the company’s general superintendent, says the purist approach is out. “Do-it-yourself; let’s have workshops and we’ll teach you how to build by hand; we’ll use earth plasters - that type of thing. That was the case when it started, but almost overnight that has changed.” Recently Benchmark has shifted its focus toward large projects - schools, wineries, police stations, and custom homes. “The inquiries we get on a daily basis are almost overwhelming,” says Tucker. Benchmark is currently negotiating with a developer to build a high-end subdivision of 5,000-square-foot homes on the outskirts of Las Vegas.

Still, the do-it-yourself roots of straw bale building live on in some larger projects. Three years ago the Waldorf School in Charlottesville, Virginia, started a high-profile campaign to become the “Greenest School in America” by earning a platinum LEED rating. Like the Friends Community School 100 miles away, Waldorf administrators picked straw bale early on. The concept and aesthetic fit squarely with the holistic, outside-the-box Waldorf educational method, and the school was drawn to the idea that parents and students could help with construction - a community building project could double as a community-building exercise.

Reinventing the Bale

Other schools and churches have found the idea of participating in construction appealing, and as a low-tech, hands-on, and labor-intensive technique, straw bale is well suited to owner-builders, residential or otherwise. Recruiting friends and family to help with construction at “bale raisings” and “plaster parties” (likened to old-fashioned barn raisings) is a cherished tradition in the straw bale building community - one that has been put to good use by non-profit housing organizations such as Habitat for Humanity and Red Feather, a similar group that builds straw bale homes on American Indian reservations.

The bale-raising model, however, can be impractical for large projects: the construction manager at the Waldorf school, for one, worried that volunteer labor would hold up the construction schedule and recommended subcontracting the bale work and plastering to a professional straw bale builder. On the other hand, when using hired labor, straw bale construction can be ten to fifteen percent more expensive than conventional construction. Ted Jones, the Waldorf School’s architect, says the school’s goal was to “make the greenest building possible, but also the cheapest building possible.” Jones and the Waldorf crew investigated cost-cutting methods. They even built a large prototype of a wall section, which a Charlottesville art gallery exhibited. But in the end, as much as the community liked the idea, they had to scale back and will only use straw bale along the north faзade instead of all exterior walls. “I don’t see straw bale entering the mainstream here,” says Jones, speaking from his office in Charlottesville. “If it was less hands-on and labor-intensive, I think it would have greater appeal to more commercial or institutional clients. If there was a way to make it a more systematized construction process, that would go a long way toward making it more universally accepted.”

Straw bale construction’s reputation as “sloppy and intuitive,” (according to the book Serious Straw Bale) compared to the mathematical, precise methods of conventional construction keeps some efficiency-minded companies out of the market. It has prompted others to innovate. In an effort to lower Benchmark Development’s project estimates, increase its capacity, and open the door to new markets, the company’s founder invented a huge saw that can cut bales at compound angles. “We’ve been trying very hard to develop our methods of construction on a mainstream scale, to where we can do more production-oriented projects, as opposed to just working with the straw bales with our bare hands,” Tucker explains. But even professionals like Benchmark can run into problems. During the Santa Clarita project, subcontractors unfamiliar with straw bale removed a series of braces holding the bales in place and walked along the tops of the bales Benchmark had installed, causing the bales to tip and fall out of alignment. A mix-up involving drains during construction also soaked two-thirds of the building’s bales, which needed to be replaced.

Builders are exploring ways to streamline the construction process. Two Canadians, Chris Magwood and Jason Whitfield, struck upon the same idea that Ted Jones did and, for the past three years, have been working independently to perfect prefabricated straw bale walls. Whitfield, who sells his walls commercially, has tried to keep them “as conventional-looking as possible,” and seals them completely in wood and concrete stucco. The custom wall sections weigh between 1,200 and 1,500 lbs., and in a 1,500-square-foot house they take about a day to install. At this point, they are still slightly more expensive than wood-frame construction, but customers are not balking. Whitfield has built about 100 walls to date, mainly in Canada, though he recently completed an addition on a brick house in Denver, and has received inquiries from Vermont, Virginia, and Texas. “The gatekeepers in all of this are the developers and the builders,” says Whitfield, explaining what led him to prefab. “You’re not going to get into mainstream subdivisions, or into any kind of development in a city or an urban setting, if you can’t convince the developer and builder that it’s not going to take a year or two to build a house. Builders have to see that it’s something they can handle easily, and that they don’t need any special skills.”

Cities are considered the final frontier and the last great untapped constituency for straw bale construction. “More than half the world’s population lives in urban areas,” says Bruce King, the straw bale engineer and author. “Having your cute little off-the-grid, hand-built straw bale house on five acres of land in the country in Vermont or California - that’s fine if you want to do it. But I’m not interested, because it doesn’t speak to the world’s population. It’s not contributing to the way we get by as a species.” A few urban straw bale structures do exist - one of the most celebrated is a two-story, owner-built house in a crime-ridden neighborhood of Berkeley, California - and they do have benefits. Straw bale muffles street noise, builders point out. The architect of the Berkeley house, Dan Smith, adds, “What if someone shoots a bullet? These walls are ever so much more secure that way.” But the thickness of straw bales is a major disadvantage in urban areas. Every square foot of space is precious in cities (and some suburbs), and 18- or 24-inch-thick walls eat up interior space. One solution, of course, is to build up. But three or more stories is uncharted territory, and might pose a moisture problem by exposing the surface of the wall to rain and snow. Some builders and architects have begun experimenting with rain screens that would shield multistory straw buildings from the elements, but to bring straw bale to urban areas will likely require rethinking the “big fuzzy brick,” as King puts it.

Several efforts are underway to do just that. A handful of private companies have been processing straw into a plywood-like particleboard, and a number of others are currently manufacturing structural insulated panels (SIPs) made from compressed straw, which are far thinner and faster to install than bales, but are also less insulated and have a higher embodied energy. (The straw bales in the Waldorf School’s plans have been replaced with straw SIPs.) Perhaps the most promising track melds this industrial approach with what one might call the straw bale tradition: an attempt to make the straw bale smaller, denser, and more uniform without sacrificing its insulative properties.

King himself sits on the board of directors of a California company, Oryzatech Inc., that took out a patent in 2005 for a “culm block” - a 12 x 12 x 24-inch block made of compressed straw, roughly two-thirds smaller than a traditional field bale. The patent describes a process that would organize, align, and bind jumbled bale straw into something that resembles a block of drinking straws set on end. This would produce a sturdier block, which Oryzatech envisions as an alternative to lumber and cinder blocks. In contrast to straw bale, however, the system is proprietary - very proprietary. “We’re still developing them,” says Benjamin Korman, one of the inventors, “and we’re not at liberty to talk too much about that.”

Riding the Green Wave

So what do the movement’s revolution-minded founders make of all this corporate influence? Some are concerned that mainstream architects and builders are misusing material. King in particular takes issue with the “hubris” of the “big name architects” who “almost without exception are screwing it up pretty royally” - as an example, he points to what he considers profound design flaws in the Santa Clarita facility. He’s not alone in worrying that unqualified builders or a public disaster in a major project could set straw bale back. At the root of the ambivalence, however, is a sense that opportunistic builders and architects have adopted straw bale as a way of carving out a niche within the increasingly lucrative green building industry, and not out of a sincere commitment to its underlying principles and ideas. The straw bale community has always had its eye on the big picture - community, self-sufficiency, sustainable living - and has little interest in seeing straw bale become a mere accessory of sustainable chic.

“What I’m concerned about is that it becomes just like other commercial construction,” says Joyce Coppinger, a straw bale consultant and the managing editor of The Last Straw, “which means that it’s done fast, and it’s done at cost-plus-profit, and that it loses the creative and innovative aspects of people building a structure in which they plan to spend the rest of their life, or raise their family. I think we’re all concerned about getting away from nature and sustainability, and also from that special kind of building that only owner-builders build.”

David Eisenberg is one of the founding fathers of the straw bale movement and spearheaded the effort to establish straw bale building codes across the country. So it is a bit surprising to hear him temper the sky’s-the-limit talk of straw bale subdivisions and apartment buildings: “One of the things that happens naturally is that a building system will find its natural limits,” he says. “When you find yourself having to do a whole bunch of other stuff” - like rain screens - “to make up for the shortcomings of something you want to use somewhere, then you should ask yourself if you’re using the right thing. I’ve always said that you shouldn’t use bales where it doesn’t make sense.”

Although he still works as a straw bale consultant from time to time, Eisenberg, who chairs the U.S. Green Building Council’s “Greening the Codes” committee and last year finished up a five-year term on the USGBC’s board, now concentrates less on specific building technologies (straw-based or otherwise) and more on enabling a transition to sustainability on a national and global scale. He says builders will always find useful applications for straw bales, especially as concerns over energy, oil, and the lifecycle costs of buildings become increasingly important in the next few decades. But he suspects that straw will ultimately prove to be a “transitional technology.”

“Straw may be a great material, and there may be some industrial or semi-industrial processes that get done to it to be able to utilize it in an even more efficient way, or a better way,” says Eisenberg, “but the beauty of straw bale building as it’s emerged is that, basically, you’re taking this waste product from farmers, and you’re able to build beautiful, energy- and resource-efficient buildings within a fairly reasonable cost and skill level. That’s something that’s quite extraordinary. How far we can push that and have it make sense, I’m not sure. The key is to let it sort itself out.”