Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
ecology-oriented home owner had built and thought they could improve
on the design:
When I went in there the warm-like feeling [was there]. I wasn't crazy with the
styling, it was very basic, and I am sure it suited their needs very well. But it was
the feeling I got, we're gonna take this and show that it can be used aesthetically,
wonderful as an art form, rather than just [as] economical building. So that we can
be challenged, you know, an artistic challenge and have both.And engineering, you
know, 'cause the techniques are evolving, so there's ...a lot of room for creativity.
It can, of course, be both. The story told by a gay couple who decided to
build with straw bale captures nicely the tension and resolution between
the two orientations. Bill was very enthusiastic to build with straw bale. He
works in landscape architecture and is ecologically conscientious. He took
his partner, Bob, who is much more aesthetically oriented, to slide shows at
Straw Bale Association meetings and on local straw-bale home tours in and
around Austin and the surrounding hill country. Bob was unconvinced.
Retelling their house story, now that their straw-bale showplace is finished,
Bob says he was less concerned about the ecological issues than Bill was,
though he did not object to straw bale on those grounds. It was the overly
modest size and the aesthetics. “I hated them. I didn't want to live in a
shack. I wanted a nice place, a place where we could entertain our friends.”
Obviously, one person's ecological model is another person's shed. By
serendipity, a new architect came to town on a large project using innova-
tive building materials. He had extensive experience in building with straw
bale and an innovative design vocabulary for the medium, drawing on the
facility of straw bale to create curved walls more easily than conventional
materials. The result was the personal expression Bob wanted with the
high-insulation-value walls Bill wanted.
The tension between these two views is not always resolved so amicably.
Some purists and social justice activists point out, correctly, that homes in
the United States are overbuilt and overconsumptive by world standards,
and that simply building a luxury home with straw bale does not address
the problem. There is more than one perspective here. Activists are taking
straw-bale construction into low-income neighborhoods and into under-
developed countries. However, low-income families do not immediately
embrace straw bale as an acceptable home-building technique. Unlike
comfortable middle-class home builders and avant-garde designers, their
outlook is closer to that of the cash-poor Nebraska pioneers.They see straw
