Design and Build with Straw Bales
3rd – 30st August 2020
Design and Build with Straw Bales, a 4 week building course, in Villasbuenas de Gata, Spain.
We built an entire building for the development of new activities of the local community. We executed the walls with prefabricated wood and straw panels, previously built by ourselves in a shed. Once the panels assembled on site, we built the wooden roof and plaster the walls with clay and lime renders.
The hands-on training on the building site was complemented by theoretical sessions in which we learnt more in detail about the following topics:
– Building with straw: Straw as a building material: properties and selection. Different techniques for straw building. Focus on prefabricated panels techniques. Production line. Assembly. Design rules. Constructive details. Electricity and plumbing. Compatible partitions typs, flooring and roofing.
– Building with wood: Durability classes, constructive details. Basic dimensioning.
– Building with raw earth: Earth as a building material: properties and selection. Main building techniques. Focus on clay plasters. Formulation. Organic and inorganic stabilization.
– Lime plasters: Lime types. Formulation and implementation.
Parallell to the building site, several activities were programmed: soil selection for clay plasters, rural-sketching, etc.
News from the workshop
ACTYVA is today composed of 400 members, including 15 associated workers and 25 volunteers, being the rest of members simple consumers of the goods and services produced by the cooperative. All united by values such as integrity, mutual support, common good, solidarity, horizontality and respect for the environment, we work in a decentralised way to address the needs of social justice and sovereignty.
ACTYVA Sociedad Cooperativa, was created at the end of 2013 in Extremadura, a mainly rural and sparsely populated region of southwestern Spain particularly affected by the context of economic crisis.
With the aim of slowing the increasing emigration of young people causing a worrying depopulation of the rural areas, ACTYVA emerged to facilitate the generation of productive projects and the interconnections between them, and to reactivate links and exchanges at a local scale.
