I worry about building fads. I've been susceptible myself. I once built a
house based on Rex Roberts (remember him?) "Your Engineered House". It was
a good learning experience. We fixed it some years later.
As Alex notes, the "findings are in" on double envelope homes as well. Lee
Porter Butler was a great salesman, but he was neither a master builder or
an original thinker.
Breathing walls? I don't want to douse the flames of anyone's roaring
fire, but isn't it just in the last few years that we've learned to
ventilate easily and well? And still 99% of the houses built today don't
benefit from this recent intelligence. So I find it painful when people
become proponents of something that doesn't work, when there's already
something that does work (thanks to the hard and rigorous work of many
dedicated individuals). Promoting something like breathing walls is
exactly like putting a product out on the market before the bugs are worked
out - does more damage than good. I don't wish to to stifle innovators,
just promoters of the incomplete. Let's hear about breathing walls when
someone has something real, and complete, to reveal. Or some good critical
questions. Get rid of all the fuzzy parts first.
It's hard for me to say, because so many people I respect are in love with
straw bales, and so many are having such a good time with bales, but this
has all the characteristics of another building fad. There's nothing wrong
with it except that it's being oversold. As Mike points out, this is not
a building system, it's a wall syatem, and in some cases only a part of a
wall system. As an owner-builder system, it's a somewhat more organic and
far more difficult version of a surface bonded Sparfill block wall. Isn't
it? And here in the East, those big bulky bales have to be carried from
many miles away on big guzzling trucks.
There's no doubt that straw has great potential as a building material and
the work that is happening with straw is tremendously exciting. Bales?
Maybe . . . I don't know. But let's be careful not to make a good thing
into a parody of itself and send well-meaning people down lovely country
roads that turn into impassable bogs.
I apologize in advance if this post sounds like a rant. I couldn't really
think of any better way to say it. Can anyone help?
John Abrams
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