Learning Curve

We've seen strawbale houses before, but in Australia, so husband and I went to take a look at a straw bale work in progress near Warsaw to compare how the technology holds up in this rather different climate.

As the technology remains somewhat experimental, its great to see how different architects, builders and owners approach both the limitations and the possibilities associated with straw bale.

The house we saw today in no way resembled the modest and square MS Paint-sketches I posted yesterday... A beautiful building is underway - but an expensive one too. Featuring curvy walls, one fully-windowed wall and wood singled wavy roof this is clearly a bale builder with cash to spare - unlike us. He also had the luxury of getting two architects on board - neither of them had previous bale experience.

Here's the house's website. It's called the Spiritual House

One of the great ideas the architects came up with - and the design is supposed to have magically revealed itself upon owner and architect during meditation - is a hollow masonry wall which is to absorb and radiate heat from the stove/fireplace throughout the center of the house (in addition to in-floor radiant heating).

Another was using logs and even trees for functional and aesthetic parts of the building - ceiling/balcony supports. Some of them were cherry trees that were being grown on the building site. A nice touch, I thought.

One of the worse ideas, in my opinion, was the excessive use of wood. A small forest was sacrificed to create not one, but two skeletal structures to house the bales inside the clay render. And in this obviously post-and-beam structure, wood was also used every two bale-heights for compression purposes.

Wood works great and is an obvious partner to straw bales, clay and in fact the entire building industry. But serving no other purpose than as slots in a giant straw bale version of "Connect Four" only to end up trapped behind 25 tonnes of clay render seems a bit wasteful.

I love working with wood and hope to be able to take some time off work when our build gets going to hand craft some sills and posts for the house. But I also hope that our house will have a much more modest construction and use much less wood, for cost purposes primarily, but also to show that a bale wall really doesn't need that much help from trees to keep it standing.

Last thing I wanted to say today was that, even with giant gaping holes where windows will go, unplastered bits of bale, an uninsulated roof and a bare concrete floor on a snowy winter day, the inside of this building was actually quite warm. Sure, my toes froze in my gumboots, but the rest of me was doing alright. I'm not sure if straw bales and clay plaster have any intrinsic warmth of their own, or if its just the cozy impression they give, but even bare and unfinished that house is doing well in this winter weather, kudos.