Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
In 1978 Dan Huntington applied for a permit “to put a roof over” a
straw-bale structure with a concrete post-and-beam frame near rainy
Rockport,Washington. Issued the most basic permit available, Huntington
and his wife lived in the structure for 2 years while building a conventional
home. More influential was the straw-bale post-and-beam cottage built by
the northern California architect Jon Hammond, because it was featured in
Fine Homebuilding.
These two examples are early hallmarks of the grassroots
innovators and professional architects and builders who have contributed to
the growth of the straw-bale movement. A December 1984 article in
Fine
Homebuilding
inspired a number of future leaders of the contemporary
straw-bale movement, such as David Bainbridge, co-author of
The Straw
House,
and Steve and Nena MacDonald, who built their straw-bale home
in Gila, New Mexico for $7.50 per square foot in 1987. By 1986 Bain-
bridge was giving talks and publishing articles on straw-bale housing.
Attending the 1987 Permaculture Design Course sponsored by the Sono-
ran Permaculture Association, at which Bainbridge spoke, were individuals
who went on to build their own straw-bale homes and to play major roles
in the development of straw-bale building, such as Sue Mullen of Gila,
New Mexico, who completed her house in 1988. A 1988 newsletter sum-
marizing the 1987 course and including an article on straw bale by Bain-
bridge influenced yet another circle of future activists in the movement,
including Matts Myhrman, who, with Judy Knox, founded the information
and education service “Out on Bale (un Ltd.),” which publishes a quarterly
journal titled
The Last Straw.
(Much of the history reported here is derived
from this journal.) A 1989 straw-bale workshop in Oracle,Arizona, brought
together David Bainbridge, Bill Steen, Matts Myhrman, and Pliny Fisk of
the Center for Maximum Building Potential in Austin to work out consis-
tent methods for building with bales. This was a crucial juncture in the
exchange of tacit knowledge, the standardization of practice (to an extent),
and the structuring of a network to disseminate it.
In the 1990s, straw-bale buildings of all shapes and sizes proliferated
throughout the United States.The early 1990s was also a period of dramatic
increase in newspaper and television attention to straw-bale building along
with numerous hands-on workshops. It was also the period in which the
first explicitly straw-bale bank loans and building permits were issued.
The groundwork for straw-bale building permits was laid in Tucson
through the activism of straw-bale advocates and a building code culture
ready to receive them. Today a number of counties and cities in Arizona,
