Thangmaker || Sustainable Building and Good Music Too

May 1999 excerpt, Southwest edition

Green houses are popping up in the Hill Country faster than bluebonnets in April. Austin ranks as one of the nation's hotbeds of sustainable building. Here, experienced architects and builders find homeowners excited about environmentally friendly homes with down-to-earth energy bills.

People are building houses out of various materials such as straw bale, rammed earth, cob (mud loaves), or insulated wall form systems (made from recycled pallets or plastic foam coffee cups). Hundreds of other residents are building houses out of standard materials but incorporating passive solar heating and cooling features and solar hot-water heaters. Costs range from $65,000 homes that cut energy bills in half, designed by architect Gayle Borst for Casa Verde, to architect Marley Porter's showcase $200,000, 2,600-square-foot, post-and-beam straw bale home, complete with a hanging garden over the living room.

"Austin is a progressive city with an educated population," says Duncan Echelson of Bowerbird Construction, who has helped build 18 straw bale homes in Dripping Springs. "We're not afraid to try things on the new side, as long as they make sense."

A Green Community

A big part if the credit for this environmental building goes to the city's innovative Green Building Program, which provides information, assistance, and referrals for local residents. (It won America's only award at the Earth Summit in Rio in the innovative government environmental category.) The program grew out of the work of Austin architect Pliny Fisk and partner Gail Vittori, whose Center for Maximum Building Potential building research in the seventies and eighties. Community members share their latest discoveries at the monthly meetings of the Sustainable Building Coalition.

"Straw bale is a good community project, like barn-raising." says Frank Meyer, whose Thangmaker Construction Co. specializes in houses that are made from stacked straw bales. Stakes are driven through the stacked bales to hold them in place and the "straw walls" are then plastered, usually with stucco, on the interior and exterior. "It's very user-friendly, do-it yourself." Thirty of his friends showed up for his wall-raising party, so he threw two more (parties) to stucco the outside and inside.

While back-to-country ethic, cheap land, and lack of building codes lead many people to build green homes in rural areas, Frank and his wife, Amy, decided that an essential aspect of sustainable building meant living in town to avoid burning fossil fuels on a long daily commute. So they bought an old wood-frame home in the central Austin neighborhood of Travis Heights, and Frank designed a 500-square-foot straw bale addition, giving the boxy house a pleasing new facade.

"I wanted to build a natural house with great street appeal," says Frank. He succeeded beyond anyone's expectations. From the Hill Country vernacular front porch, framed by cedar posts, to the curved niches built into the straw bale front wall, this house has a warm, natural feeling that is characteristic of many green homes.

Click here for Natural Home article.