[Strawbale] A request that came to DCAT from Switzerland

[Derek Roff]

There is documentation on some of the oldest Nebraska strawbale 
structures in various books, including Bill and Athena Steen's "The 
Straw Bale House", Bruce King's "Design of Straw Bale Buildings", and 
Catherine Wanek's "The New Strawbale Home" and "The Art of Natural 
Building".  There are some pictures of these 100+ year-old buildings 
on one of the pages of The Last Straw website:

<http://thelaststraw.org/sban/tour/tour.html>

Architect Werner Schmidt is only a few mountain ranges away in 
southern Switzerland, and might be a valuable resource.  He's done 
laboratory testing on jumbo bales, and has designed and built many 
innovative SB structures.  He's a fun and exciting person to spend 
time with, as well.

<http://www.atelierwernerschmidt.ch/Atelier.html>

Derelict

Derek Roff
Language Learning Center
Ortega Hall 129, MSC03-2100
University of New Mexico
Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001
505/401-4608
Internet: derek at unm...



--On Sunday, June 12, 2011 8:21 AM -0700 David Eisenberg 
<strawnet at aol...> wrote:

Hello all,

I am hoping that there is someone in Switzerland or at least on this 
list in Europe who can give this person the help they are requesting.

Thank you,

David Eisenberg
www.dcat.net


Date: June 11, 2011 10:37:19 PM PDT

Email: lamdaki at live...
Questions: Hello Mr. Eisenberg,

we are a little family living in Nax, Switzerland.
We want to build a small hotel with as a straw bale house 
(mayaguesthouse.wordpress.com)
. We got pretty far with our project, found a bank to finance it, but 
their constriction expert doesn\'t know how to handle this kind of 
construction.
Not having a straw bale house in the region he estimated the 
durability at 15  years.
Do you have any sources, documents about straw bale houses older than 
40/50 years? Something we can prove that it is to be handled as any 
other building?

Thank you very much

Lisa and Louis Papadopoulos

By the way, we have your name from Natural Homes.