I have a friend who was born and raised in a west African country. He earned his PhD from a university in Texas and settled near Austin. He built a small strawbale building on his property and his family back in his country of origin were surprised that he would choose to build with straw (a good insulator against the crazy heat we have here) rather than choose conventional industrialized U.S.ian methods and materials.
Yep. I am reminded of a Shelley poem here.2
Acceptance of or opposition to buildings constructed of natural and/or traditional materials by craftspeople and skilled folks in the trades has always been a point of friction in “Western” culture even though such methods and materials choices are time-tested and known to work well in context. [massive-head-desk.gif] International building codes have slowly been morphing to be more accepting, but there are plenty of places in the U.S. where “experimental” or alternative building methods (i.e. anything not conventional) are excluded from permitting and regulating authorities.
The Last Straw is a good, encouraging journal (here I am swerving back on topic). It’s a decades-long ongoing project to educate more people about natural building, including post-occupancy case studies and modern practices like fire-testing1 at a test facility run by ASTM. Some years ago it published some cool stuff on leaned “arches” aka Nubian vaults: very Egyptian and I think pretty genius.
Traditional Iranian architecture has similar climate hacking features. Utterly fascinating to me. My assumption is that once electrical demands make reliable grid-provided power increasingly difficult (or impossibly expensive), wind scoops, windcatchers and other known hacks will once again be used, at least by the precariat, who already bear the brunt of climate breakdown–if and only if they can afford to stay in one place, and that place has a reliable food and water supply.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
