Living and Building with Straw and Clay, with Athena Steen, Co-Author of

Click on the photos in this article to see a larger version. All photos show exteriors or interiors of straw-bale homes and are from Athena and Bill Steen's website.

Diane: How did you first get interested in straw-bale construction?

Athena: I got into it when I was in college and I was looking for a place to live. I was not willing to pay the high rent of Santa Fe, but I couldn't imagine living in a place that was not mine. My mother is full-blooded Native American, and because of my heritage I grew up in natural buildings. As young children all the way through high school, we were accustomed to building our own homes. The thought of living in a place I could not touch because it belonged to someone else was beyond my capacity.

I had grown up in Santa Fe and was accustomed to living in adobe homes. And adobe is a wonderful material. But my co-builder (who was my husband at that time) and I were trying to build in the middle of winter, when adobe freezes. With straw-bale construction, our materials did not freeze, and we were able to build with a lot less labor.

We put up a small, 200-square-foot straw-bale cottage, and I lived there for five years with my two children. It was a passive-solar design, so we stayed very warm.

My first husband and I thought we had invented the straw-bale technique. It wasn't until years later, when I met my present husband, Bill, that I discovered that straw-bale construction was also done about a hundred years ago, in Nebraska.

The beauty of straw-bale construction is that you can keep the building costs very low, and it's easy to learn how to build. Within a very short period of time you can learn to put up the walls and a very simple roof. If you stick with something simple, almost anyone can do it.

Diane: What's the difference between straw and hay?

Athena: Straw is usually the left over stalk of whatever grain you're growing. Wheat is most commonly used, but any variety will work.

"Hay" usually refers to alfalfa or some other grain that is used for animal food rather than for building.

Diane: I've seen the color of straw when I was viewing a straw-bale homesite in Crestone, Colorado. It was a beautiful bright yellow!

Athena: Yes. You don't want to use green bales, which are still live matter. It has to be dead stalks of . . . whatever. It can be prairie grass. We've also used corn stalks and frijoles (bean) bales. Almost anything works as long as the straw is dry.

Diane: Let's go back to what you mentioned earlier. You said the first straw-bale homes were built a hundred years ago, in Nebraska?

Athena: Yes. You can still see several of them standing — houses and churches. We've even found patents in Illinois and other areas where people were either building them or at least thinking about it.

Diane: What was the construction process like?

Athena: For the most part, there were just four load-bearing walls. They took the full weight of the roof, and there were no extra post-and-beam structures inside. They all tended to be fairly simple, one-room designs. And since they were using prairie grass, I think it was probably much better straw than we use today.

Diane: So how did they make a bale?

Athena: Bales began to be used when the hay baler came along. People who didn't have access to them used hand presses. Today, it is all mechanized.

Some of the older homes used cement to seal the hay. Back then, cement had much more lime in it, and that made it breathable.

Diane: Is cement considered a natural product?

Athena: It depends how you define "natural." Cement is a mixture of lime, clay and aluminum, and it takes a lot of processing. After mixing, it is heated to extremely high degrees to refine it.

Today, if we can get away with it, Bill and I use clay plasters to seal the walls. You can get all the ingredients right out of the ground.

Diane: Can you give me a step-by-step of how a straw-bale home is built today?

Athena: The most important thing is the foundation, because straw bales are sensitive to moisture. That doesn't mean they can't be used in wet climates — they can and they have been. Humidity is not a problem for the bales. It just takes good design and a good foundation.

You want to get the foundation above grade about 8 inches or more. It has to be something that won't wick moisture up into the bales. A cement foundation is most often used, although we've seen stone as well.

You can get as "alternative" as you want. If you use cement, it must be adequately sealed, because cement does wick. Sealing stops the moisture from coming up from the ground into the bales.

In past years, re-bar was used in the foundation to attach the bales. But re-bar tends to bring moisture up as well, so nowadays many people are building without it.

The straw bales then get stacked on top of the foundation in a running bond, and you usually place some kind of beam on top of them. The bales then get pinned together for stability with internal pins of either re-bar or bamboo. We've even used saplings.

Lately, we've discovered that you can use external pins, and it gives you much more strength with the same amount of material.

With this method, you have a pin on either side of the bale. You tie through the bale to the pin, and it sandwiches the whole wall. That gives the bale incredible strength.

After that, you attach the roof. You usually have some way to go under or through the foundation or attach it to the foundation with I-bolts or some kind of wire strapping. There are different ways to do it.

One way is to attach a wire to the foundation, go up one side of the bale, across the roof-beam, and down the other side of the bale to attach to another location in the foundation. The wall is bound this way every six feet or so. That keeps the roof attached to the bale walls.

By using a compression system, the bales become much stronger. Whenever we build we try to introduce compression because of its strength.

From this point you start laying on the rafters just as you would in a conventional building. In the US, most walls are being covered with cement plaster or stucco, so sometimes chicken wire is run over the bales, and then stucco is applied, by hand or sprayed on.

Since Bill and I have been using all earthen plasters, we don't use chicken wire. We create a high-straw content so that we can put a one-coat plaster mix onto the bale all at once — finish it off and be done. This way the wall still breathes, which is crucial for the bales.

Again, if one is doing cement plasters, depending on the climate, they should be sealed with something to prevent the wicking of moisture to the bales.

Diane: It sounds like you're looking at a really thick-walled home.

Athena: It is pretty thick. And you can't beat the insulation. There is just no quicker, cheaper, or faster way to get highly insulated walls, and I can't think of any place in the US that wouldn't benefit from this type of building.

Diane: Are straw-bale building methods okay for a wet climate like Florida, where I live?

Athena: If you give it a good roof, just like any house, give it good window sills, and get it up off the ground with a good foundation, there is no problem at all. There have been many examples of straw-bale homes being built in wet climates.

Diane: You said you use earthen plasters. What stops the walls from disintegrating.

Athena: We've found that earth does disintegrate — the question is how fast. We've discovered that very high-sand mixes tend to erode very quickly and disappear.

What we've been doing is adding very high quantities of straw to the mixture, and this allows us to keep the clay at very high concentration. Then we don't have to dilute it with as much sand, and it doesn't crack. We can put on up to four or five inches at a time without getting any cracking. Because it has so much straw content, it creates a mini-thatch affect, and when the rain hits the straw, it just runs off.

On vertical wall surfaces, you don't want to take the plaster down to the ground because of termites and splashback. But if you keep it up off the ground and give it a roof or porch overhang, it can last an amazing amount of time.

We've had walls last for six or eight years without noticeable wear.

Diane: Do mice and pests get into the walls?

Athena: Once the walls are plastered, they are solid. They are way more solid than a frame wall. Imagine the frame walls filled with rats running and the other things that crawl. With straw bales they can't. There is too much dense material.

Again, once the walls are plastered, they are amazingly rat, insect, and fire resistant.

Diane: That's cool.

Athena: When you mix the clay with the fiber, it can do amazing things. Together, clay and fiber become this incredible duet, much more versatile than when they are alone.

Diane: Like beans and rice.

Athena: That's right. They compliment each other, and they become better together. To put cement over the bales seems so incongruous.

Diane: I notice from your website that you've been teaching people in Mexico these techniques?

Athena: Yes. When you put straw-bale construction into the normal building system of this country, with architects and contractors, you'll get some beautiful houses, but it won't necessarily be affordable. You'll be in a different realm.

But we've been teaching a women's group down in Mexico to help each other build their own homes. For me, the beauty lies when something like that can happen.

Diane: You said you started building out of necessity. But were you sort of an "earth mother" anyway?

Athena: Yes, because I grew up building on the pueblo, and we always built out of mud.

Diane: Could you talk about the stigma of using straw-bale building materials in your Mexico project, and how they are associated with lower class and poverty? How is that going?

Athena: Well, the men usually are more in charge of the building, and are most sensitive to the stigma against building with these materials. They are afraid their peers will look down on them — that they'll be "less of a man" if they build with anything other than cement.

That's why we work with the women, because actually the women could care less. They are more interested in their children being warmer in winter, cooler in summer, and more comfortable.

Also, the women are more motivated to actually have their own houses. The husband, because of his pride, will put off building the house until he has enough money for cement, rather than go to a cheaper, more available material. If you offer the women a choice between having a straw-bale house tomorrow or a cement one next year, they'll go for the house tomorrow.

That's why the women's project is so successful. You'd be amazed to watch the husbands sitting out under the tree watching everyone work. It usually takes them about four or five days — and then, on their own, they come and kick the walls, highly skeptical. As the walls get stiffer and stronger, they start to get the impression that it's not all going to fall down. Then they start getting into it.

Diane: Can you tell me what your experiences have been as you've introduced this way of living to others?

Athena: Its been amazing.

People who come to the classes we offer at our place in Arizona have a chance to relax. The city world stops. When we throw water and clay together, and people stick their hands in it, all of a sudden magic happens! There is something that clicks, and they become like kids again. It's amazing to watch. They get sooo excited.

They begin to realize they can actually build something. This is all it takes, and it doesn't have anything to do with dollar signs.

Yes, it does require work, but it's work that's endurable. You get built at the same time as the house. It creates you at the same time you are creating it. This is the way I watch the process happening.

When you walk into a natural building, your body resonates with the place. It feels it. Many people don't consciously know what's going on. They just say, "Wow this feels different. It's so comfortable."

Do you realize how many of our office buildings and homes contain nothing the body can relate to in a physical sense? So we begin to lose the experience of living naturally, and we start to forget.

If we hadn't forgotten, we'd never stand for living in something so inferior as today's standard of housing. How could we? We'd never survive without growing numb to our environment.

As a culture we're forgetting where we came from and what we are, and what we deserve and what we CAN have. And then it just gets worse because the more you forget the faster you can go in the opposite direction.

Diane: I understand completely what you are saying. The closest example I can think of is when the electricity goes out. I always notice how my body just relaxes and takes this long, deep breath.

Athena: Yes, and the world seems to be set up so we're always operating at this tense and dissociated level.

Go into most buildings. They don't do anything to connect you deeper to yourself.

Creating a space that reflects who you are deep inside is something you can never buy. You can never pay somebody to come in and design it for you and to build it for you and then expect yourself to walk into that space and have it feel like home. That's the craziest notion!

If you've had no interaction with it, no relation with it, and it's no reflection of who you are, it's never going to be home.

I've seen the pride in people's eyes and the pride in their heart, soul, and whole being when they create their own homes. There is no comparison. And it has nothing to do with dollar signs.

Diane: If we're constantly at stress and "not at home" in our living environment, it could be one of the causes of autoimmune disease, and the increased number of nervous system disorders we are seeing.

Athena: Not to mention when you start looking at the toxicity of the materials going into some of our buildings. That's even scarier. I don't even go there.

A home built with natural materials is not toxic. It can even be healing. I can build with my two-year-old right on site, and not have to worry because he's eaten something lying around or smeared something over himself. I don't have to freak out. And he doesn't have to leave me. He can be part of it, as well.

And yet, as soon as cement and heavy power tools come into play, I'm out of the picture and the baby's out of the picture and it is back to separation from my own home.

People don't realize how far removed they have become. We don't have any feeling anymore because out of survival we have to "not feel." When you're in toxic houses, driving through toxic cities, you have to cut off your sensitivities or else you wouldn't survive.

Diane: That might explain how some of the atrocious environmental decisions are being made by people in power.

Athena: You're right! So if someone walks away after visiting us, knowing there is hope and there is a different way, then I feel elated!

I can't say I can solve the problem. All I can say is, I know what living naturally feels like, and for a few moments I can show other people this feeling.

Somewhere, there is hope and possibility. Maybe it's small. But how else is it going to start?

Start small. I tell people to do a playhouse or a dog house, or go out in the back yard and just start doing something. And eventually, it will carry you.

Diane: I can see you would eventually come into relationship with the earth and the environment and it would begin to speak to you.

Athena: It does that on its own. It has the larger voice, if people would listen.

Diane: Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation, Athena.

Athena: You're quite welcome!

Resources:

Straw Bale Building/Eco-Friendly Homes — a list of books on straw-bale construction, and some cool photos. Also contains a resource directory for other natural building projects and related items.
DirtCheapBuilder.com is a very nice website featuring homebuilding and alternative lifestyle books, plans, videos, and resources.
Steens's website, with lots of great photos of their Mexico project, buildings both finished and in construction.

Athena Steen is co-author of the popular book The Beauty of Straw Bale Homes. She and her husband, Bill, provide instruction on straw-bale building and are founders of the Canelo Project.

For upcoming classes, books, videos, and other information on straw-bale construction, check out Athena and Bill Steen's website at www.caneloproject.com, write to HC1 Box 324, Elgin, AZ 85611, phone: 928-455-5548, or email to .