a cave
for a
composer

Lou Harrison's Desert Retreat Joshua Tree, CA

"Lou Harrison," in his own words, "is an old man who has had a lot of fun." He was composing music before most of us were born, and is lately being rediscovered as a grand old man of American music. After thirty years perched in fog and wind above the Pacific in Aptos, California, Lou has decided to build a desert retreat, a place to work on commissions, and a place to play.

Fifty years ago, Lou wrote that "American music, like so much other American art, is almost completely the product of amateurs." The amateur is like a lover: "He loves something, gets hold of something, and takes a bite off." He adds, "I'm a grown-up kid. Art to me is play. Children get very serious about play. It's not frivolous---it's learning. If it's beautiful, that's a welcome bonus."

Designing Lou's Studio with him has been fun and a delight. Besides composing music, Lou also writes poetry, paints, does calligraphy, sculpts and loves architecture. Lou has a great fondness for Middle Eastern architecture, and we decided to create a straw-bale home which featured a vaulted Great Room, for work and play, and three smaller domed rooms for living quarters. The building we envisioned would be all straw-bale and could be put together by friends and laborers without special skills or experience in construction. The building we created has strong, simple shapes and solid proportions. The long vault is flanked on one side by three rooms, and on the other by butresses which create shaded outdoor "rooms".

Once the plans were worked out, we took them to an engineer, and then sent them off to San Bernardino County for a building permit. Domes and vaults are complicated structures, and the county wanted to see more calculations. We eventually satisfied the county's requirements, but the building had grown, in the meantime, to be very expensive....and unbuildable on Lou's budget.

So several of us put our heads together to realize our original intention--to build a straw-bale vault which used materials economically and efficiently. David Mar, a structural engineer more used to working on large steel and concrete buildings than tiny straw-bale houses , saw the potential for using the straw as a structural element and devised a structural system for the vault arch which minimized the use of concrete and cement. We built a segment of the vault, a one-bale thick arch, to test the system and the results were encouraging.

Using the test results from our arch expriment, as well as data from other tests, David detailed a composite straw-bale system using wire mesh, stucco and bales as the main components. The building is put together like a basket, wrapped with mesh inside and out, covered in stucco. The stucco provides the initial rigidity in resisting seismic and wind loading. The straw/mesh couple provides a ductile core to handle ultimate loads in an extreme event, to prevent catostrophic failure.

We have presented the system to the outside plan-checker for the County and the initial response was favorable. We are completing our drawings for a formal submission based on the new structural system. We are all excited about the potential for this system, not only for Lou's building, but for other straw-bale buildings to follow. David is already working on a prototype for Mongolia, where savings of 80% of heating costs have been realized with houses built of straw. (This can easily translate to saving a third of a family's annual income).

Janet Johnston, project architect and foreperson has begun work at the site and we hope to stacking bales before the end of August. Come back soon and visit us for an update!