Straw bale beauty

Photo: Our own bale house in Monroe, Maine, 900 square feet, shown here during last year's renovations, built for less than $20,000 in 2003


The New York Times has an article and slideshow today on some very artsy-craftsy straw bale houses in the Catskills.

I recommend both. The slides show particularly beautiful dwellings that must add deeply to the day-to-day lifestyle quality of the users.

The photos show how graceful bale-building can be, and how it can be incorporated into other architectural styles.

I don't think the example is very helpful, though, to the ordinary American human. The owners and builders of these homes obviously have money and time.

Most ordinary Americans have way too little of either, and so if a building is to be truly exemplary, and help solve serious societal problems like climate change, it has to work within these constraints too.

Here in Maine, for instance, a truly exemplary climate friendly architecture for a dwelling house would have to be capable of being built for around the same price as a secondhand double-wide trailer on a small lot, cost much less to heat and light, and be affordable by a family with less than the Maine average household income ($45,000).

You don't see too many architects that are willing to really work within those constraints. We know only a handful. But we do know local contractors who can fashion super-insulated dwellings using conventional-but-local materials that meet these kinds of constraints.

Examples of both are under construction on our college campus right now. The Terra Haus, an exemplary passive solar dorm, is designed by local architectural firm G.O. Logic that is also designing homes for the Belfast Cohousing and Ecovillage group.

A little to the south, Bellerose Construction is creating a super-insulated annexe to Koons Hall, our main science building. Joe Bellerose, an alum of the college, has been building cost-effective super-insulated dwellings in the Unity area for many years now.

Our own experiments with straw bale many years ago, recently renovated, showed that it was a useful form of insulation for use in a natural-material home, but that cheaper, more ecologically stable insulation was available for owner-builders who didn't have a hang-up about using non-natural materials.

An update in the form of letters of advice to prospective bale-builders is available here.