The quake-resistant buildings designed by PAKSBAB (Pakistan Straw Bale and Appropriate Building) are intended to be affordable, energy efficient, and locally built with readily available materials.

Bamboo rods and nylon fishing net act as the reinforcement and tie-down system; the netting is wrapped under a soil-cement-encased gravel-bag foundation (made with old vegetable sacks), up both sides of the load-bearing baled-straw wall, and attached to the wooden top plates. The wall-tall bamboo, which also engages both the foundation and the top plate, is attached upright in opposing pairs on either side of the wall at frequent spacings and 'sewn' together through the bales, providing flexible resistance to out-of-plane forces. The whole assembly is covered with earthen plaster. The roofing is light corrugated steel. The hand-made structural straw bales — there are no posts or other bearing members — are smaller than those produced by automatic balers, which are rare in developing countries.

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Sea Change Radio recently had a great discussion with Alex Wilson. From their website:

Alex Wilson founded BuildingGreen in 1985, when the green building movement was in its infancy. As executive editor of Environmental Building News, the bible of green building, Wilson has provided the information that has formed the building blocks of the movement. In November 2008, Wilson received the Leadership Award for Education from the US Green Building Council, whose board he served on from 2000 until 2005, the crucial period when the organization created the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification.

Wilson launches the conversation with a primer on green building and its history, starting with an explanation of LEED. He then compares indigenous structural design, such as the Anasazi, who oriented their dwellings toward the sun to capture solar energy, compared to design that developed in the age of cheap fossil fuel, which abandoned age-old principles of efficiency. Wilson points out, however, that the Anasazi civilization collapsed due to reliance on unsustainable water use — a fate our current culture may share with them.

Wilson highlights solutions, such as green roofs and urban agriculture which integrates into the built environment, citing the example of City Farm in Chicago. He then proposes the idea of passive survivability, the notion of designing our buildings to survive the kinds of challenges that will become more prevalent as the climate changes, such as power outages and water shortages. The beauty of this idea is that it's exactly the kind of design we need to achieve sustainability.

Download the interview, or stream it at the Sea Change Radio website. Alex starts about 5 minutes in.

Over 18 years and more than 160 issues of Environmental Building News, I've written quite a few articles — I hesitate to think about how many — but out of all of those, I think I had more fun and learned more in writing my most recent than ever before. "Growing Food Locally: Integrating Agriculture into our Built Environment" examines opportunities for producing food around, and on, our buildings that few architects, builders, or developers have yet considered.

I think I had my first vegetable garden when I was five or six — back in Berwyn, Pennsylvania. There were a few years during college and perhaps some of my time in New Mexico when gardening didn't fit into my life. But other than that, growing some of my food has always been important to me. Thus, I surprised myself to realize a few months ago that I had yet to write — or even consider — an article for EBN addressing the potential for integrating food production into our built environment. I had nibbled (sorry!) around the edges with articles about green roofs and passive survivability, but for some reason it never occurred to me to tackle this topic of food production directly.

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