Humble and Beautiful

The timelessness of straw bale Buildings

Straw has been used as a building material for over 400 years. The building technique was further developed during the mid-19th century in the great plains region where timber was scarce and straw, an agricultural waste product, was found to be an inexpensive and extraordinarily insulative material. Indigo principal architect Jon Hammond built one of the first modern straw bale buildings in North America in the early 1980’s, a studio in the foothills of California’s Coast Range mountains. Since then, Indigo has led the way in bringing this local material into the mainstream of construction, using it for public safety buildings, animal shelters, landscape features, and their own adaptive-reuse office in Downtown Davis.