A House Made of What?

As she spoke, Bart was standing in the middle of one of the area's strangest-looking construction sites: a maintenance building for Bowie's parks and grounds department. On an elevated platform, a worker stuffed handfuls of straw into chinks between the bales. With bales piled up and loose stalks underfoot, the site looked as if a hayride might have crashed nearby.

The new building is part of a maintenance complex that will have several green features, including roof gardens and tubes that funnel sunlight into interior spaces. One part of the building is being made with straw; regular sheet metal is being used for the rest.

"It's a demonstration," said Una Cooper, a Bowie city spokeswoman. "But this is new territory for us, so we have just two walls of it."

Friends Community School, which has 165 students in kindergarten through eighth grade, took an even bolder approach. The building's outside walls were filled in with straw bales -- again, used as insulation around the building's skeleton, not to hold up the roof.

Connie Belfiore, the school's interim leader, said green building fit the Quaker campus's focus on protecting the environment. And the walls, which are about 22 inches thick after the plaster is applied, will save money on heating and air conditioning.

But it's one thing to know all that and another to accept that your building is really being stuffed with straw.

"When we went to the site and we actually saw the straw bales there, upon an initial impression they looked like Halloween bales" or props for a fall carnival, Belfiore said. "And we said, 'We're really going to put up a building made of that?' "

They did. School starts Sept. 4. Expecting to give tours, school officials left a "truth window" in the front hall, where bales are visible through a cutout in the wall.

Even fans of straw say it has drawbacks as a building material. The thick walls take up a lot of space, and some projects won't fit on small lots. Because of the labor involved, a straw-bale wall can cost twice as much as a regular one, although some homeowners save money by doing some work themselves. And it can take time to convince building officials that a straw building meets code.

Then there are the cracks in the plaster. In some cases, homeowners have to seal them before rain or rodents get in. If moisture is trapped in the straw . . . well, that's bad.

"Then your walls will turn to compost," said Hutchins, the Takoma Park architect.

But straw builders say their structures are just as sturdy and fire-resistant as more conventional ones. In fact, they say, people really ought to be worried about places filled with such insubstantial materials as fiberglass and drywall.

"You see McMansions going up, and, I mean, talk about huffing and puffing and blowing your house down," said Bart, the builder on the Bowie project. "I mean, those things are made of nothing."