You Can Huff and Puff but this Straw House is Staying! 🐷

First @Lada Prkic said, "Look at this straw clad house in Albuquerque",  then @Claire Cardwell said "Look at this straw bale construction for cheap housing in Africa", but I said, "No way, José. One-off novelties. They'll never really take off!"

Well, was I wrong, or was I wrong?

I was looking through some correspondence from the Institution of Civil Engineers in UK (I've retained membership, even since I stopped practicing there some 36 years ago) and stumbled across two papers that changed my mind, in their 2016 ICE Publishing Awards section, acknowledging the best work published in ICE journals. These papers are freely available at the following links:

http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/pdf/10.1680/coma.11.00003

http://www.icevirtuallibrary.com/doi/pdf/10.1680/stbu.13.00073

The research, published in 2012 and 2013, by various authors from the University of Bath, England, describes the development and testing of a prototype house, built using timber framing and straw bales. The papers present the positive results of credible research into durability, fire resistance, acoustic transmission, air permeability and thermal properties of the straw bale panels used in construction.

The above feature photograph, from these papers, represents the tested prefabricated BaleHaus, reportedly built using ModCell panels "as load bearing structural elements". Figs 1 and 2 below, also from the papers, show details of a typical timber framed two-bale panel.

                                                                            Fig 2:  typical two-bale panel

It is quite clearly stated that more research is required in order to gain appropriate material certification for widespread development, but the results of this prototype testing, which also included full scale lateral load tests, appear very positive.

But most interesting of all are the introductory background sections which claim that the revival of straw bale housing in recent years has seen "a few thousand" successful projects being completed in California, and "well over one hundred" in the UK.