Ontario Straw Bale Building Coalition

Toronto Parks, Forestry and Recreation with support from Toronto Parks and Trees Foundation, is planning to construct a straw bale teaching kitchen in High Park in 2011. Building structures of natural materials on municipal property can be a challenge, as the Friends of Dufferin Grove Park can attest to.

This is a natural complement to [Continue reading...]

The Last Straw Journal has announced the public release of a new web site providing an interactive dialogue about all aspects of strawbale and natural building design and construction.

The TLS blog features:

articles from issues already published – you can add your thoughts,
questions, experiences without logging in.
featured articles from the most recently published issue – so [Continue reading...]

The Sustainable Building program at Fleming College invites you to attend our Celebration of Completion at the Camp Kawartha Environment Centre at Trent University on Thursday, August 27th at 1pm until 4pm.

This is the fifth project the program has completed, and it features prefabricated straw bale walls, site baled and earth plastered bale walls, slip straw [Continue reading...]

An ocean apart, hot on the heels of the Camp Kawartha Environment Centre project is the BaleHaus at the University of Bath. Both projects feature prefabricated straw bale wall panels that were constructed and plastered under controlled conditions in a warehouse. The projects are to be completed by August and September 2009, respectively.

Looking at [Continue reading...]

Source: News release from University of Nevada, Reno, 02 April 2009

It huffed and puffed, but the 82-ton-force, earthquake-simulation shake table could not knock down the straw house designed and built by University of Nevada, Reno alumna and civil engineer Darcey Donovan.

The full-scale, 14-by-14-foot straw house, complete with gravel foundation and clay plaster walls, the way she [Continue reading...]

Many of you have met Henry Wiersma and his amazing earth block machine and heard about the fire on his property a couple of years ago.

Northumberland Today has published an article, Dream built brick by brick, about Henry Wiersma’s construction project using unfired brick and straw bale.

An excerpt:

At present, he is building a house with [Continue reading...]

With the world economy slowing, many new building projects have been postponed or canceled. By necessity, the focus in the sustainable building world will shift to existing buildings, communities and sites. There exists a great opportunity to reduce our ecological footprint by improving what we have. By upgrading the underperforming built environment that we already inhabit, [Continue reading...]

John Straube, über award-winning Big Head in the building science world has published an overview of the science behind straw bale buildings over at BuildingScience.com.

John shares the Big Head award with Bruce King, editor of the definitive handbook of technical strawbale design, Design of Strawbale Buildings, available from Green Building Press.

Bruce King and John [Continue reading...]

The OSBBC web site is being upgraded from a flat HTML site to a dynamic database-driven site, with a new address, www.osbbc.ca. We’re still moving over pages and fixing things up. During the move the old version of the web site is still available at old.strawbalebuilding.ca. Once the move is complete the old version [Continue reading...]