Transition Culture

A Natural Way of Building (2002)

**A Natural Way of Building** (this article originally appeared in Convergence Magazine)

*Permaculture designer and teacher Rob Hopkins of The Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in West Cork has been involved in natural building for more than 5 years. He has taught 2 straw bale wall raisings and workshops in other natural building techniques. In this article he looks at what distinguishes natural building from a more conventional ‘green’ building approach and what it is about natural building materials that inspire him.*

It is a beautiful summers’ evening in Mallow, and a group of people are relaxing after a hard day’s work, building the first straw bale house in Co. Cork.
As the rays of the evening sun stream into the house, the straw is turned a beautiful golden orange. The house is circular in shape, and on this first day the walls have been half built, by 15 people, largely with no previous experience of building. All the excess straw generated by the day’s activities has been tidied away into the inside of the house, which now holds about 3 feet of loose straw, a perfect mattress to recline upon. While the tired builders lie back in the evening sun, Gionata, one of the crew, serenades them on the Italian pipes, while standing on top of the walls.

A straw bale building project offers many moments such as these. Straw bale construction is accessible, safe and fun. Anyone can do it, as a result of which, building teams tend to comprise men and women in equal measure, as well as children and older people. It demystifies and revitalises the art of creating shelter, something that 100 years ago we could all do instinctively but which now, like so many other things, we feel we need experts to do for us.

Straw bale buildings are safe, affordable, durable and incredibly well insulated. A straw bale is essentially a building block and insulation all in one. It is very safe in terms of fire, being so tightly baled that it is similar to trying to set the edge of a telephone directory on fire (try it!). Although it is still an experimental building material in this climate, all the evidence so far is that its breathable walls are very well suited to our damp weather, and all the buildings erected thus far are performing excellently. Indeed, when compared with cement, which is hard and cold and non-breathing and has been blamed in some quarters for the high levels of asthma in our children, I would turn the question back round and ask “is cement suitable for this climate?�.

I often make a distinction between the terms ‘green building’ and ‘natural building’. There are many books in print now about green building and many structures are now being built with various degrees of ‘green-ness’. Often the green-ness of a building is more to do with energy efficiency than anything else, as a result of which there is often a contradiction of highly energy efficient ‘green’ buildings built from high embodied energy materials such as concrete and steel.

Natural building comes from the perspective that while energy efficiency and passive solar design should be seen as basic design principles, greater consideration should be paid to the materials used, and ideally a large proportion of the materials should come from within a, say, 10 or 20 mile radius of the site. This makes us look at what we have to hand, be it stone, earth, straw, timber or clay. By using a mixture of traditional techniques and new ways of using these materials, combined with common-sense green design, we can build buildings that are truly sustainable.

Clearly, many of the skills required for building with these materials has either never been learnt here or has almost passed out of memory. Conventional building has produced a labour force with the skills to build using a particular form of construction, but now the sustainability agenda is calling for people with a range of skills in more low impact practices. To be able to build with straw bale or cob at a rate and efficiency comparable to conventional building is a goal many in the American natural building movement are now working on. A natural builder in the UK I recently visited was coming close to building with clay/straw at speeds similar to conventional construction. In my experience, the demand for natural buildings is potentially enormous, but we have a huge skills gap.

At the Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in Enniskean, Co. Cork we are attempting to fill some of this gap, with courses on various natural building techniques. We always make our natural building courses practical, giving people a feel of the range of techniques involved. We feel that we are at the beginning of something very exciting, which brings together environmental sustainability in terms of creating ‘green’ buildings, but also social sustainability, creating a sense of empowerment through a group of people coming together to build a house.

People from all walks of life, working alongside each other, organizing themselves and discovering their collective power. People who had always felt they were useless at ‘that kind of thing’, go home after a workshop saying ‘I built a house!’ Natural building, instead of involving complicated techniques and hard, toxic materials, is a pleasure, involving activities we last did when we were kids, piling up straw bales, making mud pies, whittling sticks. You immediately feel at home with the materials and their possibilities.

I’ve worked on a few natural building projects, helped with some, taught and organized others, and the best advice I can offer is to try it, you’ll find it very addictive. Do a workshop, learn what a good cob mix feels like, how wattles go together, how to pin straw bales together. Experience the thrill and the comradeship of working with others on natural building projects. Then go off and build something for yourself, perhaps a small shed or quiet space to start with. Teach your friends, share the skills. Rediscover your deep intuitive ability to house yourself and to create beautiful spaces. You’ll find yourself building homes that are a gift for future generations rather than a burden, homes which cherish the Earth they are built on and the generations who are yet to live in them. As the great American writer Henry David Thoreau wrote, “what is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?�