Ontario Straw Bale Building Coalition

The City of Toronto has an open request for proposals for design-build of a straw bale children’s teaching kitchen building in High Park.

There is a mandatory site meeting on-site at 10:00 AM, April 9 2010. Proposals are then due [Continue reading...]

The much-awaited return of the straw bale building registry is back, having been upgraded from regular web pages to a completely new database-driven system based on a customized version of Open-Realty. Have a look at the new dedicated web site Straw Bale Buildings of [Continue reading...]

Home Sweet Home
Competition Founding Awards

Join OntarioGreenSpec.cain kicking off our new Ontario-wide green building challenge — the Home Sweet Home Competition!

Witness history being made as four of Ontario’s building leaders are recognized for creating healthy, affordable, energy-efficient homes in the following categories: Production (builder-initiated); Custom (owner-initiated); Affordable (social [Continue reading...]

This year’s AGM date has been set for Sunday, March 28. We are really hoping that you will be able to come out, renew your membership, and have a voice in the direction of the OSBBC. The AGM will be hosted this year at the new Camp Kawartha Environment Centre just north of Peterborough, built by last year’s Sir Sandford [Continue reading...]

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...]