For the Haiti Challenge, the Architecture for Humanity team provided on-the-ground reports from Haiti.
You wouldn’t think the first strawbale house in Haiti would be right next to the airport. I didn’t know myself until we headed out there Saturday–our four-door Tata barreling through the white and dusty streets of Delmas Thirty-something, and my thinking “well this route looks familiar.” Five minutes past the airport we were on another gravel road between walled-in industrial property and warehouses, plate metal gate after plate metal gate. Until we reached one very festively-graffed gate: names of several organizations-transforming-into-hands raising the nation of Haiti. A knock at the gate and a hidden door open in just a crack. We’re here to see Martin Hammer of Grass Roots United. After a bit of explanation, the whole great door slides aside and the Tata gently rolls into a simultaneously-secretive-and-open-hearted construction compound.
Just past the tree bearing visitor tags and the de-cholera station was a hive of activity. People–Haitians and foreigners–were scurrying around a very peculiar plastic-bottle based building. The straw house was but a modest neighbor–a small rectangular and unfinished house that no one was at the moment working on. A dark plaster scratch coat and a trench for porch foundations greeted us. As did a couple booted brim-hatted utility-belted types that included Mr. Hammer.
He welcomed us within, and what happened was incredible–the ruckus from next door was almost totally blocked off, save for the window openings. The walls had incredible sound insulation that worked just as well for everyone conversing inside. The sound is absorbed by the walls means that you hear what’s coming from someone else’s mouth and not the reverb echoes you experience in, oh say the concrete Rebuilding Center.
What we were looking at was the strawbale interpretation of a traditional Haitian ti-kay house: two conjoined rooms with a front and back door–though the interior wall has yet to be built. The walls were very thick and roughly, plastered. The roof looked traditionally framed, though there was something odd about the truss pieces. We’d soon learn that the more-than-it-seems motto really captures this little house.
Martin had a lot to catch us up on–most notably the Haiti-specific customizations. The first major point was the straw–rice straw harvested from the fertile Artibonite valley some miles north of Port-au-Prince, making the material local and readily available. Baling isn’t a tradition in Haiti (most times the straw is burned), but Martin’s team introduced a machine that can get the bales to just the right density for construction purposes. Size is a factor too and, as you can see below, the bales they’re making are considerably smaller than your average North American–you just don’t need them that big. Moisture is a concern, especially being in the Caribbean. This house has been equipped with about 20 moisture sensors placed throughout the walls to make sure it’s not a problem.
Martin draws our attention to the ceiling. The Roof is framed in a unique truss system that reuses pallet boards as much as possible. He points out though that the rafters need to be stronger dimensional lumber to withstand hurricane forces. They’re also experimenting with a bamboo drop-down ceiling for the back room. Insulated with a fireproof mixture of straw and clay, the ceiling intends to keep the heat collected by the exposed metal roof away from the living area. Otherwise, hot air will rise to the ridge and escape through several overhead openings. (Here Martin also notes that the walls were intended to be a foot taller, but compressed quite a bit when they strapped down and stabilized the bales–a problem that can be fixed by increasing bale density in subsequent batches.)
Another inventive solution the Grass Roots team came up with was the use of rubble for the house’s foundations. We were all standing on a layer of crushed rubble that could be covered in a cement-infused compacted clay. The footings of the house, where the walls enter the ground, are also composed of rubble–packed into rice sacks and tied together with chicken wire and layered over with concrete. This goes up to about 18 inches from the ground, at which point a moisture barrier separates the concrete/rubble footing from the rest of the straw wall.
So Haiti’s Straw House is experimenting with a lot of very resourceful techniques–now the question is how to replicate it. Martin Hammer hopes to get teams of builders trained in the techniques of straw house construction, but a system like this is much less intuitive than confined masonry, a facile alternative. It’s possible the best way of replicating straw houses is by specially training craftsmen in specific zones of the building, so no one boss is wracked with what amounts to decades of nuanced engineering and experience with a building material just now reaching the island nation.
Additional photography by Tommy Stewart.
