Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
closeness to the person you have been doing this with all day, who also
stayed until it was finished.This is part of the shared community of the wall
raising that is the hallmark of straw bale. But it is more, too. It is that qual-
ity that Marx points out is missing in the division of labor, why it is alien-
ating instead of empowering: the sense of a job well done. It is also the
shared practice with those who have helped, the solidarity of the work
space. Here it is not collective class consciousness; after all, the people
involved are mostly middle class, are building individual homes, and may or
may not work together again. It is about shared practice, learning, work, and
shared knowledge gained in a situated practice that you and another per-
son have in common—the building block of community. You look forward
to seeing that person again at the next straw-bale wall raising.You will both
come again, not because you are planning to start your own home next
month and payback is fair play (the rationalist approach) but because com-
munity is being built with shared values and shared labor.
Several other layers of meaning have been incorporated into straw-bale
culture. One is a tradition of having all those who participated in the wall
raising write a good wish for the inhabitants of the structure and tuck it in
among the bales. Another is the tradition of the “truth window,” a small
area, with or without a door, that reveals that indeed the straw bales are
there underneath the plaster. These range from the simplest of framing to
very elaborate shrines, port holes, custom, antique, and ready-made shutters
and doors.
Another aspect of the romance of straw is its apparent simplicity.The size
of the bales gives the sense of building with giant Lego blocks. With a
good-size crew, all the walls can be up in a day. This is slightly misleading,
since the foundation, roof, and finishing take much longer, but the bales
themselves are symbolic of the human-scale possibility and the empower-
ment to take your environment into your own hands and build what you
want.The simplicity also references the supposed simplicity of farm life and
mentality.When I told a friend of mine that I had started researching straw-
bale building, he replied that it gave a whole new meaning to the expres-
sion “hayseed.”The straw-bale movement has taken gleeful delight in using
such stereotypes and turning them to their advantage in their choices of
newsletter and web site titles: “The Last Straw,” “Out on Bale,” “Save the
Bales,” “The Baley Pulpit,” “Around the World in 80 Bales,” and so on.
Many such expressions are due to Matts Myhrman's unique sense of
humor, but my favorite is his statement which captures the cultural ethos
