In the New York Times today: A paean to East Meredith builder Clark Sanders, who was the first person to build a code-approved straw-bale house, and who has been quietly perfecting the art of building homes out of hay and plaster in Delaware County for decades. An excerpt:
Since 1989, Mr. Sanders, 58, a quietly intense former veterinarian, has made 11 straw-bale structures in this rural, arts-focused community in the northern Catskills, a part-time home to many in Manhattan’s creative classes. Meticulously and gorgeously wrought, the structures are calling cards for the man and the material, a renewable and inexpensive resource that produces a tight dwelling that stays cool in the summer and warm in the winter. Beloved by owner-builder types since the 1970s, straw-bale houses were built largely under the radar and off the grid until the early 1990s, when a mini-boom erupted, mostly in the southwestern states and California.
The article includes an incredible gallery of photos, featuring a straw-bale house Sanders built for his ex-wife as well as Sanders's own hand-built fieldstone house, the work of 25 years' worth of nights and weekends. (We're pretty inured to so-called "house porn" around here, but the photos of Sanders's work are enough to make any shelter aficionado weak in the knees.)
Reaching a little further back in the archives, Sanders featured prominently in an article about straw-bale building in the Spring 2007 issue of Next American City. A snippet:
Sanders has become something of a straw-bale guru to a new generation of builders in the East Meredith area, where straw bale construction has taken off. His output - six homes built over the past twenty years - may sound underproductive, until you see them. His straw bale masterpiece, a 2,500-square-foot, two-story gabled home set on 45 acres, which he sold as a vacation home to a couple from Manhattan, contains rounded plaster windowsills and walls, salvaged barn timbers, a curving mud-and-straw staircase, and earthen floors. Entirely handmade, it took Sanders five years to build. “To me,” he says, “a house is just a sculpture that you can live in.”
If you're interested in straw-bale building, and curious to learn more, you might want to check out The Last Straw, a quarterly print journal devoted to the art. The editors also post many articles (some of them quite technical) on the Last Straw blog.
