Under the tutelage of an old master, Tod Neubauer, one of the great solar pioneers of the 1940s and 1950s, I started working on energy-efficient housing in the early 1970s at Jon Hammond's innovative design firm, Living Systems. Jon was one of the first to recognize the enormous potential of straw bale building in California. Our work included providing data and workshops for the city of Davis, California, where we developed a climatically oriented building code.

My work continued at Mike and Judy Corbett's Village Homes Development where more than two hundred contemporary homes, many designed by John Hofacre, demonstrated how effective simple passive solar designs can be (see the book Village Homes Solar House Designs). The energy-efficient virtues of these otherwise normal looking houses have made this subdivision one of the favored (and now most expensive) places to live in Davis.

My explorations with solar buildings continued while investigating the benefits of super-insulation, which had first been recognized in Canada and Alaska. I traveled widely to talk with builders and owners of super-insulated homes and discovered that the major problem with most of these houses was the extra complexity and the high cost of building double stud walls with spacers, trusses, and other features in order to gain an insulation factor of R-40 to 60. Even with these high initial costs, the life-cycle costs of super-insulated homes are much lower, and the additional comfort and energy savings can be worth the expense. And yet, in a society that ignores life-cycle costs, and in an era when few people can afford a house of any kind, these up-front costs can be prohibitive.

I was so frustrated by this problem that I gradually eased out of solar design and returned to my roots in ecological planning and development. Still I remained interested in "affordable housing," and kept up with innovations in the use of alternative building materials. I maintained a small file on straw bale construction, and while working on a sustainable agriculture research project I was introduced to the growing problem of straw disposal. I was shocked to learn that straw burning by farmers created more pollution (specifically, carbon monoxide) than all of the electric power generating facilities in California!

It was then that all the pieces clicked into place. Why not use this time-proven building material to provide low-cost, highly insulated buildings. With this realization I began a more determined search for information on straw bale building, with the help of friends in the U.S. and Canada. The wealth of documentation was just waiting to be discovered, from a virtually unknown Canadian technical study to extensive information on the many existing straw bale buildings in the United States.

I published a couple of articles on bale building in 1986, and began talking about the subject to various public audiences. So began my straw bale adventure, which has continued to the present with the publication of this book. I hope that we have succeeded in communicating some of what has inspired us.



The preceding article and photograph (originally in black & white) appear in The Straw Bale House book (available at any book store), and are reprinted here with permission. David is a co-author of The Straw Bale House; eight years earlier, he wrote a prospective review of the future of straw-bale building—it was very conservative, as events have shown. He teaches environmental studies at United States International University in San Diego, 10455 Pomerado Road, California 92131, and conducts research on desert restoration, watersheds, and alternative building systems.