Take 80 bales of straw, a truckload of recycled wood and dozens of used tires. Add some spirited students willing to spend their weekends putting it together, and you get . . . well, not exactly what you envisioned.
It started last spring when 18 undergrads joined a student-initiated class (CE 159: Building Alternatives) with the goal of making a tool shed of straw bales. Instead, they wound up with straw-bale benches and a straw-bale sound wall—and a short course in land-use planning. The experience of framing the shed and then learning that it violated county building restrictions gave a 21st-century twist to a 100-year-old building technology hailed for its light impact on the environment.
Straw-bale buildings were popular among late 19th-century settlers of the Great Plains, where wood was scarce. Today, they are experiencing a revival, particularly among people who are concerned about the environment and want to help build their own homes, says architect Ken Haggard of San Luis Obispo, Calif., who co-designed the state’s first permitted straw-bale house in 1992. Holding enough air for insulation but not enough to promote combustion, the hard-packed bales help keep homes warm in winter and cool in summer, not to mention sparing trees, he says. They offer surprising design flexibility, lending themselves to curved walls and any number of architectural styles. And the experience of stacking them with friends and neighbors is, in Haggard’s view, “a way of breaking out of an overly industrialized society.”
In the pioneer tradition of working as a community, the students designed the 270-square-foot tool shed themselves, under the guidance of civil engineering professor Boyd C. Paulson. They decided to build it on the Community Farm, a student-run organic farm on the edge of campus near Sand Hill Road. Together, they secured the materials: bales of rice straw donated by a farmer in the Sacramento Valley, tires from a recycling station and surplus wood from a Habitat for Humanity project. Over a string of weekends in late April and May, they met at the building site to install a foundation of gravel-packed tires, erect the wooden frame and insert the bales. “The whole class was about working together and learning together,” says Lauren Dietrich, ’03, the urban studies major who coordinated the project.
Like most faculty members who guide student-initiated courses, Paulson, ’67, MS ’69, PhD ’71, stayed on the sidelines: “I’d advise them now and then, and I lectured about affordable housing and structural safety, but the students set everything up.”
Everyone assumed it would be okay to go ahead with construction because the shed was intended only as a temporary demonstration project. But no sooner was the scaffolding up than it had to come down. University officials informed the students that Stanford’s county land-use permit prohibited new construction in the zone containing the Community Farm.
The news didn’t quell their enthusiasm—but with less than four weeks left in the academic year, they had to shift gears fast.
“We met and made a list of the remaining things we could do with the allotted time and materials,” says economics major Ben Abadi, ’04. “And we decided that building a wall would allow us to learn the same skills while also providing a benefit to the Community Farm.”
A couple of noisy air conditioners outside the adjacent Environmental Health and Safety building made it hard to carry on a conversation in the garden area. So, working four days straight with straw, bamboo rods and an earthen-colored plaster, the students constructed a hefty sound wall—8 feet tall and 15 feet wide—which effectively damps the noise. They also built a three-sided bench, giving gardeners a shady resting spot.
Regulatory glitches notwithstanding, students came away describing the project as a positive experience. “Everyone said it was incredibly valuable to work outdoors and receive credit for collaborative physical labor,” Dietrich says. “What I learned most is about the time involved in making a construction project run smoothly. It was an interesting and challenging exercise to work through the bureaucratics of regulatory procedures when our project already incorporated a sustainable approach for both design and construction.”
Dietrich and others are already planning a straw-bale shed that will be properly permitted. “We’re excited to work with the administration,” she says, “to create a lasting structure.”
