European Tribune - Community, Politics & Progress.

The Three Little (Green) Pigs

by Londonbear
Tue Dec 5th, 2006 at 09:26:09 AM EST

Once upon a time there was a mother pig who had three little pigs.

The three little pigs grew so big that their mother said to them, "You are too big to live here any longer. You must go and build houses for yourselves. But take care that you do not damage the planet"

The first little pig went out and built his house of bricks. When his mother saw it she said "Your house is so cold and getting those bricks cost so much in fuel. And it is so tiny". "I could not afford many bricks" said the first little pig sadly.

The second little pig went out and built his house of wood. His mother never saw it. The rain came and washed it away because he had removed all the tree cover from the hill.

Cold and wet the two pigs went to see their brother. He had made his house out of straw and old car tires. It was so warm and so big that the three brothers could all live there with their mother.

A fairy tale? Not quite...

From the diaries - whataboutbob

Last week saw the completion of a study centre in England's Lake District. The architypical English country cottage has a thatch roof made of the straw from specially cut reeds.

This construction uses straw for the main part of the walls and unlike thatch does not need very skilled workers to build with. Unlike brick construction straw does not involve considerable cost in fuel to both transport and make the bricks or to extract the clay, which of course leaves scars on the landscape. It also has far better thermal insulation than even a double brick cavity wall. Typical "McMansion" construction techniques in the USA involve the use of timber framing and infills using a lot of products from the petrochemical industry.

This is by no means the first building to be built of straw. Straw walls with a coating of cob (stones set into mortar) to make them watertight used to be a traditional building method in Devon in the west of England. It was also popular in Nebraska where there were few trees for the settlers to use to build cabins. Proving affordable homes has meant that some in the south-west England have developed self-build schemes using similar techniques.

The building technique can be adapted to local resources. The Cubria example uses old tires and waste clay that would otherwise have gone into landfill to form some of the supporting pillars. In another older scheme in Kent, near London, chestnut stakes cut from local trees were used to hold the first few rows of straw bales firmly to the foundations.

Straw is not just for rural building though. A scheme in Islington, London, shows how it can be adapted for city use.

This particular building has high quality finishes as this interior shows.

It also used a steel framework and has other innovations like sandbag cladding to insulate the interior from the noise of the next door railway line. Built as a demonstration/prototype, part of the cladding is clear to demonstrate the building material

Straw is rapidly becoming a valuable asset rather than a waste product of farming. These examples demonstrate that a far more environmentally friendly way of using it is in construction rather that using it as part of biomass for conversion to fuel.

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The Three Little (Green) Pigs | 29 comments (29 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

The govt.'s usual response to eco-housing is "Unfortunately the houses would be prohibitively expensive to build."

T'would be good to get some numbers to debunk that--if such numbers exist. (Tyres + straw + minimal steel + some wood = cheaper than bricks + steel + etc.?)

Here's another eco-centre--an Earthship--built of tyres, straw, etc.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 06:28:07 AM EST

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

There may be something to it. It is cheaper to build a house with no thermal insulation which then requires spending more energy on climate control (whether heating or cooling). It's like in energy generation, where the market favours lower capital costs up front and higher operating costs in the future.

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 06:44:20 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 5)

I'd still like to see some figures.

What gets me is that the govt. could start building eco houses with zero footprint, roof them with turf...

I like Hundertwasser's attempts to bring architecture and nature together.

...there would be high demand for the housing stock, plenty of (and especially) young people to do the work; university involvement re: renewables, permaculture aspects....I is a dreamer... The costs, I bet, would be no more than what it'd cost to pay to build standard boxes. And adding in a future revenue stream...public housing...rented properties...gardeners...tech links...etc...

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 08:28:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 3)

Although Hundertwasser first achieved notoriety for his boldly-coloured paintings, he is more widely renowned today for his revolutionary architectural designs, which incorporate natural features of the landscape, and use of irregular forms in his building design. Hundertwasserhaus, a low-income apartment block in Vienna, features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. He took no payment for the design of Hundertwasserhaus, declaring that it was worth it, to "prevent something ugly from going up in its place".

I wonder if it has any structural problems. Has anyone here been inside?

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 08:48:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

After Hundertwasser fell out with the original architects (insufficient room on the project for more than one large creative ego), he was assigned a city architect to oversee the structural issues. Not an absolute guarantee of structural soundness, I grant you, but his lack of formal training was taken into account.

by Sassafras on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 01:33:01 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

I've been in his Viennese houses. It was an amazing physical experience. It's like walking in the woods. Your point of gravity shifts constantly. The steps of the stairs award the same sensations.

I think his intuition is dead-center. Flat surfaces are "unnatural." We've spent milleniums on rolling turf.

Of course it's a problem moving a chair or a table around and there's a little more floor surface to scrub than meets the eye.

by de Gondi (publiobestia aaaatttthotmaildaughtusual) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 06:32:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

...that the govt. could...

And wtf would that be the responsibility of the government?! Start building it yourself if everything is that easy.

by ustenzel on Fri Dec 8th, 2006 at 09:09:56 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 4)

This has become a permanent interest for me and I have a big list of links to bio-housing sources:

http://www.domespace.com/vinter/
http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/3842
http://www.earthshipbiotecture.com/ Excellent.
http://domebuilder.wecre8.com/index.htm
http://www.shelterpub.com/_home_work/HW-book.html
http://www.domehome.com/
http://www.heimstatt-tschernobyl.com/index.php?fid=&id=2-3-0
http://www.caneloproject.com/ Excellent
http://www.strawbale.com/index.html

Our knowledge has surpassed our wisdom. --Charu Saxena.

by metavision on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 07:14:21 PM EST

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

Very interesting. I dream about making my own "green" house once...maybe in next life...haha

by vbo on Mon Dec 4th, 2006 at 11:52:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

I too am really attracted to the idea, but don't see how it could ever happen, in my lifetime, as you say.

by jjellin on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 05:56:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

In the late 1970s, I had a (former) friend who built a straw house.

What a disaster!!

The straw was donated but it cost a bunch to haul to the site, the house took three times as long to build and cost three times as much because of unconventional building techniques, the electrical inspector made him put all the wire in conduit because romex through straw was not allowed, etc.

Actually, it was a pretty nice house and it got into a bunch of publications. He eventually got a regular mortgage, and the project began to recede into the expensive nightmare category when he started to notice that his heating bills got higher each winter. Finally, after some thermal imaging showed he had almost no insulation at all, he tore open a wall and discovered that in just six years, the straw had crumbled into dust.

So the dream of affordable housing through straw crumbled into dust. It was a crackpot idea--the kind ONLY people with too much education could conceive.

Nice to see that England is still the home to overeducated crackpots!

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Tue Dec 5th, 2006 at 08:09:20 PM EST

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

Hah! See what experience is worth! Knowledge theoretically is one thing but experience... It's priceless!

by vbo on Tue Dec 5th, 2006 at 10:41:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

I think experience always risks falling over the edge...where language pulls it back. Theory tested by experience... But who remembers perfectly? Where are those people? Why aren't they writing the news--and are they? Ach. I admit I sort of avoid the news. It doesn't seem real.

You've had some experiences, vbo. You wrote once about "not forgetting for 500 years," something along those lines, and I thought (I'm not sure how long after), "Why pass down your tragedies to your children? What are they supposed to learn?" Which is a harsh lesson, as we wish to express knowledge as a...not a product, not yet...as a sacue, well boiled, reduced...but we are all humans, so our shared disgrazie are shared, but who want's more disgrazie?

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 07:52:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

Unfortunately we never learn from other people's experience...No...ow...until we are actually old enough and scared of adventure...ha-ha.
But there is something in collective (group) experience ...we better do not forget it...cause we don't want terrible things to be repeated , don't we??? That's why we remember holocaust, for example...
It would be nice though to forget past and live like nothing happened...even on individual bases...I wish I can forget my mistakes...but then again if I do so I can easily repeat them , don't I ?
In this case I was talking about very practical experience of house making. My husband and I built house once and when we finished we knew exactly what we shouldn't do if we ever make a house again...ha-ha, Not that I want to ever build house again...No...ow..

by vbo on Mon Dec 11th, 2006 at 11:45:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

So the dream of affordable housing through straw crumbled into dust. It was a crackpot idea--the kind ONLY people with too much education could conceive.

It couldn't have been that your friend didn't build his house properly, could it? I mean, before calling hundreds of thousands of people crackpots with too much education, did you check whether his case was typical?

A minute of google and I found this...

Design of Straw Bale Buildings

INTRODUCTION

Nature to be controlled must be obeyed.
- Sir Francis Bacon

The oldest known straw bale structure in the world reached the century mark in 2003, an anniversary of both sentimental and technological significance.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 03:28:01 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

Not that your friend's case may not be typical--I don't know, it just sounds...untypical. Maybe his experience has been verified elesehwere. May he will be part of the debunking of over-enthusiastic ideas!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 03:31:13 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

Testing the debunking...

(From google search straw insulation longevity

Straw is a very resilient plant material. The California Straw Building Association (CSBA) says that when straw is plowed into the ground, it can take up to six months to decompose. Rice straw, which has a high silica content, takes twice that time. The key to the longevity of straw bales is keeping them dry. Straw has been found intact in ancient Egyptian tombs. Certainly its use as a building material has spanned centuries around the world.

Q: What about the longevity & duration?

A: Historically the existing straw-bale & hay homes of the 1900's built by the Great Plains homesteaders proved, beyond a doubt, that when properly built & maintained, can have a useful lifespan of 90 or more years. The plastered cob, waddle & daub (clay & straw mixed) homes of England & Japan have for many centuries, providing a warm and healthy habitat, surpassing the cold cobble stone castles in comfort levels and energy efficiency.

(90 years? Need to build the property in such a way that the failing bales can be replaced...)

As for longevity, straw bale advocates point out that many 19th- century Nebraska straw bale homes are still standing.

"We all went back there, and it was reassuring to touch and knock on buildings and realize, if it's built right, there's nothing to make it deteriorate," Smith says.

Q. What about durability/longevity?

A. The evidence provided by hay and straw-bale structures built by Great Plains homesteaders starting in the late 1800's indicate that bale houses, if properly build and maintained, have a useful life span in excess of 100 years, even in areas where high winds and snow are common.

And here's a cracked pot.

(It took me a while to realise I was searching for "crack" and "pot"--then the familiar leaf appeared...)

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 04:14:47 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

I also liked this quote, though it's at a bit of a tangent.

We live in a timber framed farmhouse built about 1590. We are having some electrical work done on the top attic floor which is intended for habitation. I notice that the space under the floorboards is mostly filled with dry hay and hayseed. There is a substantial amount of this material which would take days to clear out and involve lifting many ancient floorboards.

Do you think it needs to be removed? At first I wondered if it had been deliberately put there as some form of old insulation? Was this common? Alternatively the attics may have been used when it was a farm to store seed and it has simply fallen through the gaps between the boards and accumulated there over many years.

My concern is whether it is a fire or health hazard (i.e. attracting mice). So far I have found a couple of dead birds and a dead mouse under the boards. Your advice would be welcome. My inclination is to clear the bits I can get to easily and leave the rest well alone.

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 04:26:34 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

Is it possible my friend built it wrong?

It is not only possible, but likely. He had never built a straw house before and wasn't that experienced in traditional methods. He HAD read a bunch of books.

But here's the point. Straw has no structural value so essentially you must build a timber-frame building and use the straw as insulation. Timber-frame houses are expensive, difficult to build well (this is where I got roped into the project) use hard-to-get materials, and are nearly impossible to trim out. Did I mention expensive??

And yes it is possible straw MIGHT work in milder climates. Ours swings from -35°C to + 35°C in a year. His straw first crumbled on the south wall where interior temps may have reached +50° on a July afternoon.

And then there was a rodent problem. Friend's wife got really spooked about mice in the wall. After a couple of years of trying to keep the mice out through mechanical means, poison was tried. Killed some rodents--and the smell drove out the wife. They divorced over that damn house.

But hey, if you think that straw is a good building material, you are free to try it. All I know is that I would not build such a house with a gun to my head--no matter WHAT Google says.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 01:53:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

Amen!

Excellent!

I ain't going to be building a house out of anything for the...well, for the rest of my life, I think.

But I wouldn't mind having a go...with the latest knowledge, the latest materials...your friend took his belief to the extreme. I hope he is very happy; glad of his pioneer status, coz who knows who will get it wrong when the rules aren't clear?

So, I think, from the diary, that they have understood the basic properties of straw bales. They understand that a well-built straw bale outperforms all substitutes, and it is recyclable...it's dry grass...grass, from mesopatamia... I heard that the original wheat, the original grass that we call wheat grew up in three valleys in modern day Turkey. All the wheat in the world from three valleys... Good ideas will thrive by their applicability....

Yeah!

Don't fight forces, use them R. Buckminster Fuller.

by rg (leopold dot lepster at google mail dot com) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 07:45:46 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

Let's get serious here!

There is absolutely NO reason why straw would be on anyone's list as a BUILDING material.

Here's why. A straw house must have everything else any other house has--doors, windows, roof, stove, furnace, etc. So the ONLY place straw could have any potential savings is in the area of wall insulation.

So to save a few bucks for fiberglass batts, you have to rework the whole house structure at the cost of thousands. Since straw has about 1/5 the insulation value of fiberglass, the wall has to be 5 times as thick and probably MORE than 5 times as expensive to build.

I label the straw proponents crackpots because these folks have this glorious notion that somehow we can solve our problems by returning to some mythical idealized past where basic raw materials had virtue due to their primitive nature. (sheesh)

If you are REALLY interested in green housing, go to Sweden. There the builders have thrown a great deal of science and engineering at the problems of energy efficiency, interior air quality, resource utilization, and durability (every new house must have a guarantee of 50 years for ALL components.) These houses don't look strange nor are built from primitive materials so they don't get the sort of press of a straw house. But they DO have the advantage of actually working VERY well as a shelter.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 11:22:04 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

Straw has no structural value

Do you know the one about how it's easy to break a straw but not a bundle of them?

Doesn't straw perform the same structural function in cob or adobe as steel performs in reinforced concrete?

What are the structural properties of straw? Are there data anywhere?

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 11:32:10 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

Are you suggesting that a wall built only out of straw bales could be stable enough so that you could frame a roof based on it?

Let's not split hairs here. Straw MAY have some structural value by introducing a fiber into the construction of mud bricks, but that is NOT what this discussion thread is about (or didn't you computer download the pictures?)

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 11:52:51 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

Well, there's this one building with a vaulted ceiling made entirely out of straw bales... http://www.skillful-means.com/projects/vault/The%20Vault.html

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 12:00:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

Iraq has several styles of traditional reed houses, the largest and most elaborate of which is the mudhif of the Marsh Arabs, which can be really enormous. I've seen one. It was easily the size of a two-story building, and quite solid. There's a photo of one here.

And Gertrude Bell described one in a letter to her parents:

Now a mudhif you can't picture till you've seen it. It's made of reeds, reed mats spread over reed bundles arching over and meeting at the top so that the whole is a huge, perfectly regular and exquisitely constructed yellow tunnel 50 yards long. In the middle is the coffee hearth, with great logs of willow burning. On either side of the hearth, against the reed walls of the mudhif, a row of brocade-covered cushions for us to sit on, the Arabs flanking us and the coffee-maker crouched over his pots. The whole lighted by the fire and a couple of small lamps, and the end of the mudhif fading away into a golden gloom. Glorious.

But the Iraqi reed houses were always designed to be temporary, and could be quickly dismantled and moved in case of flooding or other calamity. I assume the reeds also needed swapping out once in a while, which is certainly true of thatched roofing.

by the stormy present (stormypresent aaaaaaat gmail etc) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 12:35:32 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

In the first sentence of the site you link, there is this, "The Vault is an award-winning studio made entirely of straw."

And yet, in the pictures, there are windows and doors and a stucco-like exterior.

I guess the word "entirely" means less to a bunch of hippies than to the rest of us. It's this kind of "thinking" that allows folks to make completely dishonest claims about the virtues of straw construction. Trust me on this, windows are NOT some sort of cost-free detail.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 02:41:55 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 1)

What makes a stone brick more stable than a straw bale?

Didn't the Romans build structures out of large blocks of rock, which held together without mortar?

Those whom the Gods wish to destroy They first make mad. -- Euripides

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 12:10:23 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (none / 0)

It's more durable?
It's stronger?

Hey guys, if any of you want to build a home using straw, can I at least have the popcorn concession?

BTW, where I live, the law (snow load) says a roof must be able to support 293 kg / sq. meter (60 lbs / sq. foot). Get back to me when you have figured out how to support that much weight with straw.

"Remember the I35W bridge--who needs terrorists when there are Republicans"

by techno (reply@elegant-technology.com) on Thu Dec 7th, 2006 at 02:29:02 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: The Three Little (Green) Pigs (4.00 / 2)

Straw Bale House building party in a residential n'hood in Central CA

using the right species of grass for the straw, baled properly into standard sized bales, helps :-) this project was supervised and led by an expert straw bale builder.

it is very hard to get a permit for unconventional [ha! remarkable that we can now call a several-thousand-year old technique 'unconventional'] structures of this sort in urban and burban areas. friends of mine in Canada (BC) wanted to build one and were told by authorities that they would need over $10,000 in professional engineering studies before permits (at additional cost) could be issued. the permits and paperwork were adding up to more than the materials. they gave up and are moving to a rural area with less restrictive code.

in my town it is not permitted to build a residential structure in any shape other than rectangular. no yurts, domes, or other circular or oval floor plans. this was probably a NIMBY initiative from 40 years ago to prevent "hippies" from building the popular bucky domes of the era -- more of an anti-hippie than an anti-elliptical effort -- but now the law is on the books and it would take an effort to remove it.

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...

by DeAnander (de_at_daclarke_dot_org) on Wed Dec 6th, 2006 at 08:46:08 PM EST

The Three Little (Green) Pigs | 29 comments (29 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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