EFS Profiles
Strawbale House Project
Swarthmore College
Swarthmore, Pennsylvania
Purpose: Curriculum Change
Please note that the copyright for this profile is retained by the institution.
The strawbale house was an environmentally innovative structure, constructed mainly out of load-bearing strawbales. It was built by student volunteers, and by undergraduate student members of the 1995 Environmental Studies Capstone Seminar. The building was designed by students in this seminar under the direction of Professor E. Carr Everbach. The course is open to senior Environmental Studies concentrators, and in 1995 it focused on the various ways people can live in the world while minimizing damage to their natural environment.
The Strawbale House was begun in late Summer 1994, and the building envelope complete in late Summer 1995. Our goal was to conduct an extended research project on the performance of such structures and on related techniques that promote a more "sustainable" use of resources. Since there are few strawbale houses in areas with cold wet winters, we hope that the information gathered will be very useful to anyone interested in building a straw house on the East Coast.
The floor plan consisted of a circular living room, a kitchen, bathroom, utility room, and bedroom; the interior spaces (other than the circular living room) were never implemented. Feasibility studies were performed for several subsystems and designs were produced. The house was designed to be independent of the energy and water "grid." Water could have been kept in a refillable cistern consisting of two 80-gallon hot water tanks that the Buildings and Grounds staff had no more use for. Passive solar hot water heaters could have been implemented to circulate and heat the water in one of the tanks. Likewise wind turbines could have been added to each of the two tops of the telephone poles (records of wind speed at the site showed that such a system could have been practical) and photovoltaic arrays could have provided DC electrical power to heat or light the interior. The bathroom, which was never implemented, could have contained a waterless "composting" toilet, either purchased or of our own design. Food wastes comparable to what a small family would produce were actually composted both on-site (using a worm-based process: red wigglers) and off-site (using an aerated outdoor heap in the Swarthmore College's Nursery area). A natural landscaping plan was devised and a proposed graywater treatment facility were considered for the project.
Additional Environmental Costs and Benefits
Although far superior to traditional building methods, the house was far from perfect, environmentally speaking. The foundation used concrete and polyethylene foam, environmentally costly substances. However, the foundation was designed to use less concrete than conventional buildings do (see Technical Details, below). There was also a small amount of concrete mixed into the stucco placed on the walls. On the positive side, our straw walls had an average insulation value of R45, which means that it took very little energy to heat or cool the house.
No one actually lived in this building due to zoning and College liability issues but over 3000 people visited it during its four years of existence, including building code officials, potential owner-builders of strawbale houses, and many school groups. After the building envelope was completed, interest in "finishing" the house waned. The students who had built it had graduated or had moved on to other projects. The professor, who had put in over 1000 hours of his own time on the project, was too exhausted to push the finishing touches. The house served its primary purpose of educating those who built it. It was dismantled in the summer of 1998, and the building materials were recycled. The students in the Environmental Studies Capstone Seminar learnt about straw bale construction by actually building one, and more generally investigated the tradeoffs between environmental benefits and practical considerations. The house was not built to serve a need for housing on campus, and ended up serving as a laboratory for analyzing straw bale construction in the northeastern US.
For additional information:
The Strawbale
House Project at Swarthmore College (1994-1998) (full text)
This document was last modified on 02/20/2002 10:43:01 AM
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