Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

74 Designing ecological Habitats
• good humidity resistance since wet periods also can be quite long
• a durable life-cycle, as constructing in moderate and cold climates is
on average much more expensive than constructing in warm and hot
climates
• a non-toxic and even health-supporting quality, as people pass many
hours a day within their four walls
• last but not least: beauty – to stimulate our creativity and love for
ourselves, each other and the planet
An increasingly important consideration for the design of new houses is
the expected end of cheap and abundant fossil-fuel energy. This will affect
the use of many of our conventional building materials, which require
high energetic inputs for their production and distribution. ‘Peak Oil’ will
inevitably drive up energy prices, so the need for increased energy efficiency
is now becoming obvious to everybody. The need to reduce carbon emissions
to mitigate climate change is emphasizing the same kinds of questions. The
consequences are that we now have to consider not only how we will heat and
cool our living spaces and in what quantities but also how we will provide
the materials needed to construct them. Heating energy can be supplied
on a renewable basis only if the average energy demand of each house is
significantly reduced. There just isn’t enough biologically productive area on
this planet to grow enough biomass to meet the energetic demands of our
existing highly inefficient buildings.
During the EDE held in the ecovillage of Sieben Linden in Summer
2009, the group of participants created a list of all qualities expected by a
‘Green Building’ that would connect with the four dimensions of Ecology,
Economy, Social and Worldview. After studying the list we realized that all
these qualities would be met by a holistically designed and constructed house
built mainly out of timber, strawbales and earthen plasters. Sieben Linden
is a place where all the dwellings have been built out of these ingredients for
the past ten years: “Gosh, we can do it!”
A Smart Solution: Building with Strawbales
Building with strawbales is both a quite old and at the same time very new
technology. Very soon after the first horsepower-driven balers started to
change the face of traditional agriculture, the first simple strawbale homes
were erected by poor workers on farms in Nebraska, USA, a region lacking
wood as a building material. The oldest still-existing houses are now onehundred
years old, still being used and in good condition. Modern lifestyles
and methods forced this building material to disappear – until in the late 70s
alternative thinking pioneers in the US again started to rediscover this useful
material, compatible for an energy conscious future. The last two decades
can be seen as the real beginning of strawbale construction as a viable future
tradition, with now thousands of more or less owner-built houses in the US,