Tiny House Strawbale Workshop
Happy Earth Day 2010!
The Canelo Project is a small non-profit organization dedicated to exploring truly sustainable living systems including housing. The founders, Athena and Bill Steen, are also well know authors of books like The Straw Bale House
On their blog, The Canelo Chronicles, they record the regular happenings including this recent workshop where they built a tiny 120 square foot strawbale structure. Most strawbale homes you’ll find online tend to be much larger so this was a very exciting find. Photo credit to the Canelo Project.
Read about this Strawbale Workshop.
Strawbale Construction Portal
One of my regular readers, Mark, sent me a link to this great Strawbale construction portal. The website is packed with great information including some plans. Below is an example from a set of free plans they offer for a 10×14 strawbale building. Mark is working on converting them to metric and is considering building one himself. Thanks again Mark!
Green Hamlet – Ecovillage of Natural Homes
Oliver Swann, the fellow behind NaturalHomes.org, sent me news today about progress at Green Hamlet, an ecovillage under construction in Pupki, Poland. They have planning permission to build four buildings but the best news is that tiny homes under 35 square meters (376 square feet) can be built without official permission. The larger buildings will serve as the shared spaces (main house, barn, meeting hall and workshop). The smaller buildings will be constructed using natural building methods like cord wood and straw bales.
In July 2010 four 5-day construction workshops will be lead by Tony Wrench. You can see the natural houses Tony builds on his website, That Roundhouse. Below is a short video that shows the step-by-step construction of a cord wood roundhouse with a reciprocal roof.
While cord wood roundhouses don’t suit all aesthetic tastes they are a remarkable example of truly sustainable architecture and that a home can pretty much be built out of anything. For more information about the upcoming workshops visit the Green Hamlet website. Thanks for the tip Oliver!
