Pirate's Cove

Living like it’s 499

Beware of Wolves, but Straw Houses Could Help With Climate Change

“The Three Little Pigs” was not written through the lens of sustainable building, said Paul Lewis, an architecture professor at Princeton University. For those needing a plot reminder: One house, made of straw, blows down. A house made of sticks meets the same fate. But the brick house remains standing, saving lives and vanquishing the villain.

These days, as the planet heats up because of burning fossil fuels — with the built environment accounting for some 40 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions — the moral of the 19th-century fable should be the exact opposite, Mr. Lewis said. “The straw house sequesters carbon; the wood house is pretty good, but the brick house is a carbon bomb that actually leads to climate disaster.”

Mr. Lewis believes that straw can do much more than provide bedding in a horse stable; it can also provide the stable’s frame, walls and insulation. He and his team have showcased the agricultural byproduct’s potential by building a tiny home — the first of its kind, he said — made almost entirely of straw. The cottage, which looks straight out of a children’s book but has some elegant, modern flourishes, sits on a plot of land outside Hudson, N.Y., about 120 miles north of New York City.

Well, how does this work with tall buildings in Democrat run cities.

“The theory of modern architecture is that when there’s a material, it eventually evolves into a form,” said Guy Nordenson, a professor of structural engineering and architecture at Princeton who worked with Mr. Lewis on the project. The straw house experiment shows what that form could look like. The long-term challenge is to make straw as viable as bricks or concrete blocks, but getting to that point will require more research, Mr. Nordenson said.

Go away. Leave us alone. How much taxpayer money is being used for this?

A heat pump, powered by a battery system on the premises and solar panels atop a trailer next door, provides heating and cooling. It is the culmination of three years of research, manual labor, and trial and error. The materials cost a little more than $50,000 (a hefty portion of that — $18,000 — went toward the house’s thatch roofing).

So, about $300K in California? That trailer seems out off place, eh?