A Sleeping Red Giant: The Rapid Growth of Straw-bale Construction in China
by Kelly Lerner – El Cerrito, California
Which country has the largest concentration of straw-bale buildings? If you answered the United States, you’re correct today, but you could be wrong soon. If China’s current straw-bale building continues along the same exponential trajectory (from one school in 1998 to over 250 buildings in 2001), plastered straw bales will eventually replace the ubiquitous red brick seen throughout northeastern China. An upcoming ban on the use of brick in many provinces may spur straw-bale construction to even faster growth.
In 1994, when I first started working with the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) introducing straw-bale construction in Mongolia, the projects were small—six or seven buildings per season. Similar to my work for private residential clients in California, I focused on architectural design—integrating climate, siting, local materials, cultural traditions, and program into buildable, energy efficient designs. Experienced Mongolian builders and I trained professional construction crews and then visited building sites all over the country.
In the summer of 2001, the ADRA straw-bale project built over 150 houses at seven locations in four Chinese provinces—Jilin, Liou Ning, Heilongjiang and Inner Mongolia (see map, pg 15). This summer, we hope to build over 800 straw-bale houses in the same areas. Projects of this scale require a unique approach.
The ADRA team and I have worked for the past five years in China to create a project management system and refine our building techniques. Like the drivers of an overloaded bok choy cart on the way to market (seen in every Chinese village), we’re scrambling to keep the donkey in front of the cart on a slippery downhill slope.
Here are a few principles we’ve learned about large-scale projects so far. Though we’re working primarily in development, I think they may apply to commercial projects of a similar scale.
Successful projects are born out of local needs and enthusiasm. If there isn't local interest, take the time to educate and build local excitement and investment. Though this may be painfully obvious, too many times the impetus for a project comes from outside. An outside team might be able to build a couple of buildings successfully, but without local commitment, more complicated large projects can easily flounder and flop.
Of course, interest is born of knowledge. Small projects educate, demonstrate, and build interest. ADRA projects often offer a higher subsidy in the first few years as an added incentive to those willing to take a risk on a new technology. After a community experiences and understands straw-bale construction, it usually takes hold on its own. If it doesn’t take hold maybe it was never meant to.
Small projects provide the opportunity for exploration without much risk. Start small and work out all the kinks. Behind every successful large project are the lessons of countless little projects –some successful and some not so successful.
“Experiments” (be they with project organization, plasters, structure, building technique or design) are best tested on one building or project first and then evaluated before they being applied on a larger scale. We’ve tested and discarded many approaches on the way. We’re still in-process. I look back and laugh at my own naivete – you don’t know what you don’t know, until you learn it, the hard way.
Large building projects and rapid dissemination raises the stakes and forces the building techniques to be more conservative. I’m usually not a conservative builder, but when faced with potential mass replication, I go with proven details that have worked over time even if I think I have a better (though unproven) innovation.
I explore my ecological purism and cutting edge innovations (vaults, new earth and lime plasters, etc) for small (and sometimes not-so-small) projects here at home. I can always apply my small successes to next year’s big project and I don’t have to see hundreds of my mistakes.
When we’re building hundreds of houses, it’s impossible to closely monitor the construction. I need to balance energy efficiency and ecological concerns with systems and details that work in China – details that employ the same skills and materials already in use in the field. For instance, though load-bearing straw-bale construction can be super energy and material efficient, in a land with heavy tile roofs and concrete bond beams, big south facing windows and rainy summer weather, there is just too much that can go wrong with load-bearing. Post-and-beam structure makes more sense.
Brick columns, concrete bond-beams and concrete lintels aren’t the most energy efficient (they act as thermal breaks), but every Chinese builder knows how to work with them. I don't have to teach builders a whole new system – just how to adjust brick construction a little to accommodate some bales.
In successful projects, all partners are invested – both creatively and financially. After trying out all kinds of project agreements and arrangements, we’ve found that the success of a project is directly proportional to the creative and financial investment of all the participants. ADRA, the local government, and the house owners share equally in the cost of the houses we’re building.
Financially, if all the money for the project comes from outside, local participants have no incentive to keep construction costs low and no “ownership” for the houses after we are gone. On one project, we paid triple the usual price for cement because the contractor and supplier were in cahoots. Price gouging disappears when everyone is sharing the cost.
Learn where to give up control and where to retain control. Most decisions ultimately belong in local hands. Sharing creative control is the quickest way of adapting designs and construction techniques to local materials, skills and aesthetic preferences.
No outsider can ever know what an insider knows intuitively. Our straw-bale training is structured so that after an initial introduction to straw-bale techniques, local teams can design their own buildings while I look over their shoulders, ask questions and offer suggestions.
On critical technical issues (which could make or break the project) like waterproofing and structure, I retain enough say to prevent problems. I also press hard on energy efficiency issues like insulation and passive solar design. Other than that, the teams have the freedom to design for their own situation.
Partnering on the design short circuits any mistakes I would inevitably make out of a lack of knowledge about local materials and practices. I learn and they learn. We all win.
That’s not to say that I appreciate all their designs. The Chinese tend to like plastered walls dead flat and often apply rectangular white tile on their front walls. I just smiled and nodded when the village head in Benxi proudly told me that they had decided to paint all the new straw-bale houses pink.
Take time to develop the personal relationships and trust that will cushion the bumps along the way. A friend and I often joke that construction is so complicated it’s amazing anything ever gets built. That's even more true for large scale projects – especially in cross-cultural situations. Friendships and their influence (guan xi) grease the wheels. No lubrication – too much friction.
Though we may write contracts and memos of understanding, personal relationships – usually developed in China over bottles of rice wine and mountains of delicious morsels like dog meat, pickled vegetables and mud eels – are what really move the work forward. Informal friendships and trust bridge the gaps in the formal contracts. In one case, our jeep driver solved a huge problem getting electrical power installed to a 65-unit housing development with a bottle of rice wine and an afternoon of drinking with his old school mate, the power district manager.
Take time to create relationships and partnerships at all levels –national and local governments, regulatory agencies, architects and engineers, contractors and owner-builders. Each of these participants has information vital to the success of the project. The more that all the levels are informed, involved and invested in a project, the more they will go out of their way to make it successful. A call to a friend in the right position can keep a small problem from becoming a much bigger one. If they aren’t getting positive attention by being involved in the process, agencies or individuals (like children) may try to get attention by blocking the project.
Large scale projects shift creative energies from architectural and structural design to project design and management. In China, ADRA started small with one straw-bale school in 1998. Engineer David Mar and I could afford to explore some intricate structural detailing aimed at resisting earthquakes because contractor Frank Meyer oversaw the whole construction, carefully checking details.
Last summer (2001), after a thorough straw-bale training and design charette, the ADRA team (consisting of 3 non-technical managers, Paul Lacinski and myself) was responsible for seven construction sites spread over four provinces. Clearly we couldn’t provide the same kind of close construction supervision Frank did that first year.
Instead of overseeing construction, we spent our limited energies on project management and on training local builders. Most of the work had to be completed well before the building actually started. This work consisted of identifying the best communities to work with and crafting good working agreements with them; identifying the right people to train, getting them to them to the training and delivering a high quality training; communicating frequently with the trainees to solve technical problems in the field; timing our site visits so that we could have as much impact as possible on the building techniques and quality; and meeting with the whole range of participants at each site: local government officials, builders and owner/builders to share information and maintain financial transparency.
While good project organization is essential, the public impression of the process and the buildings will make or break an ongoing project. Tang Yuan, a small city in the northeastern rice growing province of Heilongjiang boasts over 95 straw-bale houses. When ADRA and the local government first wanted to build 10 houses there in 2000, the village-head twisted many arms before finding 8 “interested” families, even though the local government and ADRA were paying for two thirds of the cost of the houses.
The winter of 2000 was especially cold with many nighttime lows of -40° (same in C and F!). The new straw-bale owners told their neighbors about their warm houses. Their neighbors visited, knocked on the walls, sat in the warm living rooms and saw that the houses looked just like plastered brick houses. Soon the local government was fielding applications from hundreds of families for the 2001 building season.
When there’s a lot of excitement and interest, it’s easy and tempting to grow too fast. Quality suffers when there aren’t enough trained managers, owners or builders. And training takes time. We learned this the hard way in Tan Yuan.
In the first year, the local manger and ten owner-builders delivered such high-quality houses that in the subsequent year we based our training program there and granted their request for 70 new houses. Early on, there were a few problems with low-quality bales and choosing families, but we ironed those out and went off to visit other sites, calling twice a week to check in. Imagine our surprise when we returned, checked a contractor site and discovered bale walls so wet that they had mushrooms growing out of them!
The local manager, who had been so successful with 10 owner/builder houses, couldn’t deal firmly with a contractor. Touring other sites we also learned he didn’t know how to delegate and had fallen behind on the job of training all the new owner-builders.
As we fixed the problems and educated owner-builders, we planned how to better train and support managers and how to deliver training to owner-builders in future years. A high quality product, a locally appealing design and affordability are the critical issues in public impression and ultimate project success.
In Tan Yuan, all our hard-learned lessons from the first three years finally came together. Good quality building and houses that looked and felt right created a positive public opinion which in turn created a demand for straw-bale construction.
Over time, the price has come down, too. Our first small houses in Hebei cost over $4000 (due to price gouging and a costly design). Currently, the costs for straw-bale construction are running neck and neck with similar quality brick construction (about USD $2500 for a typical 650 sf (60.4m2) house).
When we ask, over 50% of our Tan Yuan owner-builders say they would build a straw-bale house over a brick house using their own money. Pretty good for a three year track record.
Upon hearing some of my more difficult experiences in Mongolia and China, Matts Myhrman shared a saying with me: “The road to good intentions is paved with hell.” While I don’t think of large projects as particularly hellish, they are one hell of a lot of work. And they always take more time than can be imagined. To stay sane, allow plenty of time for large projects to develop naturally. Mass replication will quickly reveal any weaknesses in project management or building techniques.
Large-scale projects take time and experience. Work hard, respect and learn from comrades, pay attention to both the big things and the details, laugh a lot, nap often, eat well, and trust the process.
Kelly Lerner is a can’t-keep-her-hands-out-of-building architect in the San Francisco Bay area. When she’s not globe trotting in Asia, she’s designing small straw-bale houses or mixing up earth plasters.
One World Design, Design and Consulting, 925 Avis Drive, El Cerrito, California, 94530, 510-525-858212, fax 510-528-8763
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