Sojourn Magazine - Summer '97 Issue - Straw Bale Construction, Caroline North

I am part of a collective of people who bought the land at Shenoa as a place to make a retreat and learning center. As investors, we would have the opportunity to create a village of small houses or cottages around the meadow. We wanted to be innovative in our choice of materials and designs. From my point of view, if I was going to have a second house in this world, which I think is a tremendous privilege, I really wanted to do it in a way that was innovative and alternative. My idea was to demonstrate how you could design a large-seeming space with in a small square footage area that was low-tech, inexpensive, recycled and beautiful. I found out everything I could about earthen houses, recycled tire houses and houses made of tin cans, but none of these quite matched my own aesthetic. Then somebody gave me an article from The New York Times about building with straw, and that struck a nerve. It was a very tongue and cheek, "three little pigs" kind of article, but at the end was an address for an organization called "Out on Bale" in Arizona. I wrote and discovered that they were for real and were experimenting with building walls out of bales of straw, sort of like stacking large bricks on top of one another.

I loved the idea immediately, but had no idea how to proceed until I happened to get a call from a friend, an architect named Bob Theis, who had been finding out about straw bale building on his own. He wanted to know if I would consider using straw on the cottage I was planning to build at Shenoa. The synchronicity of this incredible phone call shocked and excited us at the same and we realized we were meant to work together. We started putting our heads together, and the rest is history.

Straw As A Building Material

Ultimately, what was most important to me was to save trees by finding an alternative to wood as a building material. For years, I got depressed every time I passed a logging truck piled with cut redwoods or saw a clear cut hillside. I felt helpless against the unsustainable practices of much of the logging industry. Positive activism is my way of dealing with problems that touch my heart, so rather than protest, I try to demonstrate another model that makes more sense to me. This way I enjoy myself, rather than stoking up more anger and frustration. I suspect that joy is as important as the issues. Building a straw bale house has been one of the most fun things I've ever done in my life. It has made me a happy lady, and now I can pass a logging truck without becoming depressed.

Why straw?

Trees are a renewable resource every 50 years, but straw is renewable every year. Wheat straw makes good mulch and feed, so it doesn't stockpile at the end of each season, but rice straw has a very high silica content which means that it doesn't break down easily into soil. Traditionally, farmers burned their straw every season, but the new, strict air pollution rules have changed that so rice growers have been getting stuck with huge piles of this agricultural waste. Baled rice straw makes a very strong dense brick like building material, so it's use in construction is a perfect win/win situation for the grower and the builder. Rice bricks piled on top of one another make an extremely stable wall which is dense and extremely well insulated. A single wall functions as the inside wall, outside wall and insulation, all in one. This saves time in construction.

Piling up straw bales takes very little training, so after a few hours of instruction, a group of friends can get together and finish building the walls of a house in a relatively short time. This is a tremendous community-building activity that can be done by anyone as long as some of the people know about building techniques. All women crews have built straw bale houses and, in fact, the best builder on our crew was a woman. Another exciting thing is that children can help. The family we share the house with have two children who were involved in every stage. They snipped straw, brushed on paint, helped with the floor, and so on. There were no saws, few toxics, little wood, and everything was safe for them. It was kind of like a barn-raising. Everyone worked together, ate together and then played together. We had a superb time.

We scheduled a straw bale workshop at Shenoa for late May of 1994, and enough people came out of the woodwork to do at least two workshops! It seemed everyone was interested in learning about straw bale building. Volunteer builders came, the press pitched in, and we always had what we called "tourists" who stayed from a few hours to a few days, helping with whatever we were doing at the time. I met hundreds of new people, made many new friends and had fun, fun, fun. I'm a writer and a healer and had no prior experience building anything. I found it exhilarating to interact with practical-minded, imaginative, strong folks--a change from the artist healer types I generally work with. It gave me hope to realize that people like this exist in the world.

The Building Permit

Trying to get a permit prior to the workshop date proved to be impossible. I suppose the county was reluctant to issue a full permit for something they had no idea would work. We were offered a class K permit, which we accepted provisionally in order to get started, but it was really important to us to receive a standard permit so others could follow in our footsteps.

The Mendocino County Building Department was worried about the stability of the structure, the inflamability of the straw, its earthquake resistance, and so on. We were building the house as a load bearing structure (we may have been the first in the country to try this) rather than a post and beam structure with a straw bale in-fill. This meant that the straw itself would hold up the roof. This required quite a bit of engineering and was impossible to prove because it had never been done before, by "the code." We had evidence that straw bale walls were stable and strong because of the calculations and experimentation done by the people in Arizona, and because straw bale stuctures built on the Plains in the early part of the century were still standing. However, since no tests had been conducted to match current code for wood construction, the county felt uncertain about legally permitting it. We were given the task to build a test wall, eight feet high, eight feet wide and one course of bales thick. We were told to stucco the wall and then load it with seventy-two hundred pounds! If the wall withstood that weight, we would pass the preliminary requirements. How do you load a little skinny wall with a seventy-two hundred pound weight? For days we tossed around ideas like hauling elephants on top of the wall, or trucks, making ourselves hysterical as we tried to dream up something that would work. Then the builder, John Swearingen and Bob, the architect came up with the idea to build a wooden saddle structure that could hold six horse-watering troughs. Six troughs filled with water--two on each side and two on top would add up to seventy-two hundred pounds--an absolutely brilliant and inexpensive solution. So that's what we did. The building inspectors came and we filled all these troughs with water while they watched. Of course it took hours and hours. We succeeded, and were given our provisional permit. When we first started talking about building with straw in 1993, nobody had heard of such a thing, but now only a few years later it's in the building codes. We had taken the first step.

Prototype Time & Cost

Beginning to end it took a year to finish the house. We laid the foundation the week before the workshop to prepare for the wall. After the workshop, volunteers stayed another week to finish the walls and roof beams. The wall systems were up in two weeks. The floor took nine months. To build the same house today, it would take half the time and cost about $30,000 less. This was a learning project. We made mistakes, figured out techniques, did things the long way for which we now have shortcuts. We were faced with numerous dilemmas and challenges and had to be creative at every stage. Our house, a 950 square foot duplex with kitchen, two bathrooms and three lofts, cost the two collaborating families about $70,000 each. The design included high ceilings and was state-of-the-art in order to attract the attention of "the mainstream public." If I were to build today, I would choose a more modest design that would cost still less.

Straw Bale Around the World

As an ancient building material straw was used in Mesopotamia (not bales). In this country at the turn of the century, when people were migrating westward, straw was used to make temporary shelters in Kansas and Nebraska on the prairies. People got there in winter and needed something quick when there was no wood around. They baled the local grasses and put them up to last through the winter. Many of those buildings are still standing and are still fine, which is extraordinary. There were no building codes. The walls didn't need to be pinned and reinforced, and they have survived fine through the winters without decomposing. More recently, straw building has cut across social-economic lines here in the United States and in places like Mongolia where both a workers' village and a maternity hospital have been built out of straw. Straw bale buildings are all over Western Europe, and have been catching on especially in France and Germany.

The Design

I originally wanted a hexagonal structure, like a straw yurt. Since it was to be a duplex and the other family was not interested in this shape, we decided on an "L" shape, like an English farm house. The idea was to create a courtyard between the two wings with the kitchen at the elbow. We would have a shared kitchen. Their side would be a rectangle and our side a hexagon. It was quite a beautiful design but Shenoa's other Land Stewards voted down the hexagon idea altogether. We then decided on one large square-ish room, for our wing. I wanted a large-feeling space that could be used as a dance studio. Since the square footage was small, we raised the ceiling to create the feeling of spaciousness. The lower space is an open room with a wonderful mud floor.

The floor is a story in itself. It was a wonderful experiment and a massive job that I would not recommend to anyone. Our instructions from the people in New Mexico were to lay the mud down and then close up the house for two weeks to let it dry. We soon discovered that what is true in dry New Mexico did not apply to California in the year that had early rains that never stopped. We laid down the mud floor at the end of August. That was our undoing.

We spread the mud six inches thick and as it dried it shrank and made a few fine cracks, creating a pavestone look. But it was mush to the touch for weeks and months! The floor simply wouldn't dry! We had to walk on it anyway to continue our work on the house, and ended up with a mud floor that crumbled in a zillion places. Instead of looking like large pavers, our floor appeared like a mosaic. We had to clean out every crumbled and cracked area, refill it and let it dry again. That cracked also, so we refilled, let it dry and so on and so forth. The result looks like a jig-saw puzzle. After much sweating, swearing, worrying and praying, we ended up with a floor that is quite gorgeous.

Completion

Although each wing of the duplex is under 400 square feet, it feels vast. The high ceilings add to the sense of vastness and leave room for a loft. A loft can be used as a separate bedroom, study or sitting area. The place feels like a sanctuary or a temple which really suits me well. The tall ceilings have a wonderful resonance, very much like the sound you get in a small chapel, not an echo but a resonance. This is wonderful for dancing and singing.

The thick straw bale walls make wonderful alcoves in window areas that can be used for sitting or sleeping. These little alcoves make the space feel very cozy. I have thrown colorful quilts and pillows there so I can snuggle into them and feel very tight and warm. Its the nicest place to be in a rainstorm--toasty with radiant floor heating, curled under a quilt with a cup of tea, and a good friend or a good book. The patter of rain on the roof sounds like music. Life doesn't get any better than that!

Shortly after the house was completed, I sat tucked beneath a quilt in the alcove with my friend Clare Cooper-Marcus who had just published her book, House as a Mirror of the Self. She took me and the house into a ritual where we spoke to each other. The house seemed to be saying to me, "You've done your part of the job. Now let me do mine." I was very moved by that. Now, when I am away in Berkeley, where I live with my husband most of the time, the house receives guests from all over--rented for little vacations in season. The people who stay in the house experience being inside its straw walls, feel the energy and joy that went into its creation, and take with them the knowledge of innovative possibilities during these times of global crisis.

Carolyn North is a writer and healer and the mother of three grown children. Most of the time she lives in Berkeley with her husband of 39 years. Carolyn considers her work to be anything that reinforces the connection and balance between body, mind and spirit--be it personal, social, environmental or planetary. She is the founder of THE DAILY BREAD PROJECT, an all-volunteer organization in the San Francisco Bay area, which recycles surplus food from food businesses to local free feeding programs. She also teaches dance and sound for healing.

SOJOURN MAGAZINE - ISSUE 3 - Summer 1997