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HOW IT STACKS UP: Corum, in
the center, led a community event in the building
even before it was finished, talking about straw
bale construction with tribal youth in a summer
science program.
www.baumhower.com |
it's a 49-degree July morning
at a construction site 10 miles from the Canadian border
in North Dakota. Neither the cold nor the early hour
has discouraged the mosquitoes. Some 30 volunteers are
assembled for this week’s only hot breakfast—with
scrambled eggs and sausages, not just Pop-Tarts and
cold cereal. Although everybody worked the previous
day from 6 a.m. until past midnight, the conversation
is lively. No one is happier, though, than Nathaniel
Corum. He is, at last, done done done with the state
and federal paperwork granting permission and funds
for this “build” on the Turtle Mountain
Reservation. Plus, the rebar in the foundation all got
tied down last night, along with the radiant heat tubing.
So long as the plumber comes today, and then the cement
guys, things are about as good as they get.
The volunteers are here to raise a 2,000-square-foot
straw bale building that will serve as an environmental
research center for Turtle Mountain Community College.
Corum, ’89, is a Rose Architectural Fellow and
design director of Red Feather Development Group, a
nonprofit organization formed 10 years ago to build
housing on Indian reservations. Red Feather, which has
built 40 homes so far, took up straw bale construction
about four years ago.
Straw bale construction is an old method gaining new
advocates. The building begins with the usual poured-concrete
foundation. Subcontractors install electrical work and
plumbing. Then 80-pound wheat-straw bales are stacked
to form walls, which are secured with rebar rods hammered
into the bales. The walls get covered with stucco, inside
and out. Stacking and stuccoing are skills easy to teach
to volunteers from the community. “We liken it
to adult Legos,” Corum says. When the building
is complete, it’s difficult to distinguish it
from conventional construction, save for the “truth
window”—an opening in the stucco that lets
observers see the straw within.
Straw bale construction works well in dry, cold areas
like the Southwest or Great Plains. Because the walls
are two feet thick, the houses are economical to heat.
A Red Feather home costs about $75 a square foot to
build, while standard construction ranges from $120
to $250 per square foot. A family’s heating bill
might drop from $500 a month to less than $100. And
once the stucco has been applied, straw bale construction
is less flammable than standard construction.
Turtle Mountain Reservation, 6 miles by 12 miles and
home to 8,000 Chippewa, is by no means the poorest area
where Red Feather has worked, even though tribal leader
Gerald Monette told Corum it would take 1,000 new homes
to provide a residence for each family. Recently more
than 200 houses were condemned because of mold, so more
and more families live with relatives in crowded conditions.
Nationally, more than 300,000 of the 2.5 million tribal
members who live on American Indian reservations are
homeless or live in substandard conditions.
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"The real magic is when
you can revitalize a community and do it with
the people, empower them to help you to do a better
design."
- Nathaniel Corum |
Red Feather’s goal is that after a demonstration
build is finished, a tribal community should be able
to construct more homes using straw bale techniques
and community labor. “Education is our co-mission,
along with providing housing,” Corum says. To
that end, he wrote Building One House: A Handbook
for Straw Bale Construction, published in January
by Red Feather. (He hopes to do a second book, Agritecture,
on agricultural byproducts in construction—things
like the wallboard of sunflower hulls that will form
interior partitions in the Turtle Mountain project.)
Corum was raised on a 30-acre farm in Vermont. Now he
values his rural upbringing, but as a teen he couldn’t
wait to blow out of there. His first major at Stanford
was international relations, but he individually designed
a major in architecture and design before going on to
earn a master’s in architecture from the University
of Texas at Austin. He was a Fulbright scholar in Morocco,
where he admired how Berber tribespeople taught their
children to build as their ancestors had. The Red Feather
job allows him to combine varied interests in anthropology,
archaeology, architecture and languages. “I’m
having a great time doing this,” he says. “I’ve
been able to massage architecture into something I feel
good about.”
Corum is becoming a leader in the community design movement,
someone quoted in books and articles about architecture
in the public interest. “It’s a way of working
in the profession in a different manner,” he says.
“The real magic is when you can revitalize a community
and do it with the people, empower them to help you
to do a better design.” After planning meetings
with the Turtle Mountain tribe, their building took
on a subtle turtle-ness, with a gazebo-like entryway
resembling an outstretched head.
Stacie Laducer, director of the USDA Equity Grant at
the Turtle Mountain Community College, visited a Red
Feather build at Crow Agency, Mont. “What really
grabbed me there was all the volunteers from throughout
the United States who were actually concerned about
the issues,” she says. She saw right away that
straw bale construction was a smart choice for Turtle
Mountain because the insulation would withstand North
Dakota winters, where temperatures drop to 30 below.
Volunteers travel on their own dimes to the Red Feather
project sites. The guy who looks like a surfer dude
in nylon shorts and work boots a couple of sizes too
big is an architect visiting from Australia. Marilyn
Cochran, a veteran of other Red Feather projects, takes
the lead in constructing “bucks”—lumber
frames for windows. Patrolling the project—roaming
among the sleeping tents, the kitchen,
the solar shower unit and the line of portable toilets—is
a black dog with blue eyes named Tote, the Lakota word
for blue. Tote was a gift from Katherine Red Feather,
for whom organization founder Robert Young built the
first house.
Corum spends much of this day on a cell phone, lining
up suppliers and subcontractors and promising to fax
proofs of insurance. After the plumbers depart, red-and-white
cement trucks show up—though the cement comes
from Killarney, Manitoba, not Minot, N.D., as expected.
Corum then turns his attention to organizing a lecture
series for the volunteers and community members. He’s
lined up a couple of pioneers in straw bale construction,
a fiddler and a tribal elder versed in native plants.
The building needs to be built, Corum says, but it’s
just as important that people share their experiences.
The tribal communities have welcomed Red Feather because
it takes this partnering approach. At Turtle Mountain,
the community showed its hospitality by slaughtering
a bison. “We’re going to be eating a lot
of buffalo burgers,” Corum says. “People
are just so generous.”
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