Huffing and Puffing: A New Language for Straw Bale Construction

Item

Title
Huffing and Puffing: A New Language for Straw Bale Construction
Description
Situated in the Hauts-de-France, a region in France grappling with a severe housing shortage, this student housing project services the capital of the region, Lille, a prominent student hub, and its neighbor, Roubaix. In addition to the Nord's industrial history, the Hauts-de-France is renowned for agriculture, being France’s second-largest producer of straw. Straw bales, an agricultural byproduct, are load-bearing modules, exceptional insulators, and when used as a building material, a renewable resource drawing down carbon. Pairing the availability of the material with the region’s housing needs, the project capitalizes on straw bales’ structural, thermal, and ecological properties to expand their use in construction beyond the one-story home and develop multi-story student housing. It seeks to generate a structural and material expression unique to the straw bales to bring greater spatial and sensory diversity to extant, repetitive student housing typologies. As the discipline becomes increasingly concerned with its environmental and social impacts and shifts towards engineering new materials and building systems, there is a unique opportunity to reconsider natural materials long used in construction and address disciplinary misapprehension surrounding biogenic materials such as straw. The project diverges from trends in digital and material fabrication to embrace this hyper-local, renewable byproduct and unite ecological, architectural, and social aims.
Creator
Dankens, Juliette
Subject
Biogenic Materials
France
Nebraska-style Straw Bale Construction
Straw Bale Construction
Structure
Student Housing
Architecture
Climate change
Sustainability
Contributor
Höweler, Eric
Kara, Hanif
Date
2024-11-05T11:01:18Z
2024
2024-11-04
2024
2024-11-05T11:01:18Z
Type
Thesis or Dissertation
text
Format
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Identifier
Dankens, Juliette. 2024. Huffing and Puffing: A New Language for Straw Bale Construction. Master's thesis, Harvard Graduate School of Design.
31632473
https://nrs.harvard.edu/URN-3:HUL.INSTREPOS:37379697
Language
en