The Three Little Pigs were just too dumb to bale it. That was the problem they had with straw.
When used correctly, straw can have an insulating value of R40 or more. If those pigs had baled it, stacked it and plastered it with adobe, they could have had a wind-proof, wolf-proof home.Many pioneers, including Utah's, understood building with straw. Their homes were warm in winter and cool in summer. They were cheap to build. Straw-bale homes and churches - some more than 80 years old - are in use today in Nebraska and other states.
Still, old fairy tales die hard. If the pigs didn't do much to promote alternative building materials, neither did the American Institute of Architects.
Until recently. Now the design conferences and contests are often about "sustainable," or "green," architecture. The AIA's new president, Susan Maxum, has said the task for architects of the '90s is to reduce the impact of humans on the environment.
In Europe and around the United States, architects are designing buildings that are more self-sustaining. They use as little as one-tenth the energy and one-quarter the water of other offices and homes of similar size.
To truly meet the definition of "green," buildings must be made of recycled, recyclable, or low enviro-impact materials. Architects must take into account not only the environmental impact of producing the building materials, but also the impact of transporting them.
In Utah, too, architects are talking sustainability. They, too, are learning to light with the sun and cool with the wind.
David Brehms, of the architectural firm Giles Stransky Brehms Smith, is a local expert in passive solar design and in energy-efficient lighting. His office is in the Walker Building - which was built in 1915 and has windows that open. He loves the sunshine and fresh air. Unfortunately, he says, the past two generations of architects tried to shut out the natural world.
"But now we are going back to the low-tech solutions - except that we are using high-tech equipment to fine tune it all." In the future, Brehms says, we will live and work in structures that use hardly any energy and we will be comfortable. "We can still have a hot shower and a cold beer."
He says state government could save millions if all its buildings were as energy-efficient as the new Alcohol Beverage Control building on 1700 South in Salt Lake City. Through a design that incorporates daylighting and energy-efficient hardware, the building uses half the energy of other offices its size.
Another one of his designs is his home in Emigration Canyon. It was built in 1981, and its passive solar features are hardly state-of-the-art anymore, he says. Still, he only had to heat it electrically for a few days last winter - when the temperature outside dropped below zero.
The house is in an envelope. It's a box within a box, a home with an air space all the way around between the outside shell and the inside structure. In the winter, the sun heats up the air through the south windows, the air rises and migrates in a convective loop, encircling the house with warmth.
The houses Brehms designs now don't need a sun space. "We now have a high performance glass and we are able to use the sun directly. Glass is one of the greatest advances in building in the last 25 years. It keeps getting better.
"This is not reflective glass. People think we want to reflect the sun. We don't. We want to welcome it, in a controlled way."
Glass is one advancement. Computers are another.
Computer can control lights and heat in an office building - helping to cut waste. But more importantly, computers can aid in design.
Brehms heads a local AIA committee on design and the environment. When the committee hosts a conference at Sundance this October, national experts on daylighting and solar design will speak, and all the participants will learn to use passive solar design software.
Giving local architects the tools they need for the future is Brehm's goal. When he was in school, his professors didn't teach passive solar design.
Nor did Burke Cartwright's professors teach straw bale construction. But now Cartwright (of EDA Inc.) and Kenton Peters (of KP2) find themselves collaborating on what could be this state's first permitted commercial straw-bale building: Poison Spider Bicycles in Moab, Grand County.
Kevin Dwyer owns the bike shop. He is now working with building inspectors to get permits. Construction could begin in October.
Though some straw bale buildings are free-standing (with bales impaled on rebar) the bike shop will feature post and beam construction using bales as a nonbearing veneer wall material. When the straw is covered with wire mesh and stucco it should provide an uneven, asthetically-pleasing wall with an insulating value of R50, says Cartwright.
Straw may well be the most renewable building material around. Local environmentalist Wesley Groesbeck speculates that if all the straw leftover from the harvest of major grains was baled, you could build 5 million 2,000 sq.ft. homes every year.
Dwyer says the modern revival of straw bale construction won't take place on a large scale until there is further testing (for fire and earthquake safety) and until government regulatory agencies get behind the idea. "Banks are unwilling to finance this kind of thing."
Brehms doesn't like to see the AIA faulted because the idea of straw bale homes was allowed to die after the pioneer days. He believes straw bale disappeared for a reason: Utah's freeze-thaw cycles are too hard on the stucco.
But Dwyer says if they work in the Midwest, they'll work here.
Throughout the Southwest, now, city officials are granting building permits for straw bale construction. Even if they can't get permits or bank loans, says Dwyer, people are building their own homes out of straw bales, "clandestinely, in covert locations."
Thus even as a growing number of architects are thinking green - there is a similar straw-roots movement among just plain folks.
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Architectural viewpoints
- "The only thing more expensive than sustainable architecture is unsustainable architecture." - Carl D. Costello, Center for the Environment of the American Institute of Architects
- "The buildings designed in the '70s through the '90s are closed, unhealthy, energy-inefficient monuments." - Nancy Clanton, president of Clanton Engineering.