Straw Bale House Prototype

Indigo principal Jon Hammond designed and built one of the first modern straw bale structures in the foothills of the California Coast Range in 1981. This artists’ house and studio features an interior with local wood beams, custom exterior columns based on native equisetum grasses. This project proved that local rice-straw bales, an agricultural waste product, could be used as an inexpensive, super-insulating and fire-resistent building material.

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