Ethics, Culture and Structure in The Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes PDF

ST&HV285925.
qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 261
Science, Technology, &

Human Values
Volume 31 Number 3
May 2006 261-288
Ethics, Culture, and © 2006 Sage Publications
10.1177/0162243905285925
Structure in the http://sth.sagepub.com
hosted at
Negotiation of Straw http://online.sagepub.com
Bale Building Codes

Kathryn Henderson
Texas A&M University
This study explores building code negotiation between straw bale advocates’
ecology-oriented values and health and safety values that underlie building
codes in general by focusing on how values and ethics are articulated and
embodied in practice and discourse in the two states where straw bale build-
ing standards were first initiated. The local, contingent nature of interactions,
grounded in particular practices, material culture, and written and visual texts
in which values were embedded, coupled with organizational factors con-
tributed to strategies for a prescriptive code in Arizona and for a performance
code in New Mexico. Examination of situated practice in standards develop-
ment for unconventional materials that may not fit well with practices based
on conventional technologies sheds light on how norms associated with the
ethics of safe building are enmeshed in existing practice where they can be
taken for granted as ethical absolutes and illustrates the kinds of insights
available through paying attention to ethics in practice.
Keywords: building codes; green building; empirically informed ethics;

values discourse; organizational culture
Whatever attitude and expectations you take into the building department that’s
what you will find. If you go looking for a fight there will be one waiting for you.
But if you go looking for help and in a cooperative mood with an expectation
you will get help, the odds go way up you are more likely to have that kind of
experience, depending on who you are. They can be whoever you expect them to
be and it will be based on how they are treated in that relationship.
—David Eisenberg
Author’s Note: My appreciation to the National Science Foundation, Ethics and Values Studies
Division for funding for this research. Background research was funded by the Lemelson Center for
the Study of Invention and Innovation at the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian
Institution, and the Texas A&M Program to Enhance Scholarly and Creative Activities.
261
Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 262
262 Science, Technology, & Human Values
David Eisenberg, regarded as the “guru of straw bale building codes”1

and a respected engineer in his own right, recognizes here that the success
of achieving a building code for an alternative technique depends on the
nature of the relationships between straw bale advocates and building code
officials. Impatient or self-righteous attitudes on the part of early straw bale
advocates could spoil the endeavor at the outset since such attitudes could
affect reception of the concept by code officials. It would be necessary to
communicate the values embedded in the practice of the new technique to
officials while respecting the values of their profession. The relationships
that ultimately facilitated the writing of standards for building with straw
bales in Arizona and New Mexico were local, contingent interactions,
grounded in particular social practices, material culture, and written and
visual texts in which group and individual values were embodied. The
regional negotiations that created a new standard embodied the values of
each organization as well as values present in society at large: health and
safety for building codes and ecology and conservation for green building.
This study is an account of that process in the first two states in the United
States to pass building standards for constructing domestic structures with
bales of straw. Its objective is to explore the role of building codes as a
focus of the negotiation between the ecology-oriented values espoused by
the straw bale building movement and the health and safety values that
underlie building codes in general. My examination of such situated prac-
tice in the development of standards for unconventional materials sheds
light on how norms associated with the ethics of safe building are enmeshed
in existing practices based on conventional technologies.2 The perspective
taken here is that these positions are mediated by discourse interactions that
undermine their irreconcilability.
This study takes note of cases in which organizational norms had to
change before such mediated interaction could take place. It also gives
attention to instances in which the cultural capital of organizations and indi-
viduals influenced the readability of outsiders’ data for code officials as
well as their receptivity to it. The focus is on values and ethics practices and
discourses of straw bale advocates and building professionals at the specific
offices where approval of straw bale building was sought in Arizona and
New Mexico. Much of the earliest straw bale building innovations took
place in these two states. I also give attention to organizational cultural and
structural factors contributing to a strategy for a prescriptive code in Arizona
and a strategy for a performance code in New Mexico on the part of straw
bale activists. The dissimilarity in the codes negotiated was shaped by the
different cultures, structures, and value discourses of each state’s activists.

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 263
Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 263
Finally, this is a study about how grassroots “green” techniques were

ultimately incorporated into a body of building regulations initially written
for conventional building practice and historically influenced by the inter-
ests of the home builders and insurance industries. As such, this study offers
insights into barriers faced by techniques such as straw bale building that
originate outside corporate institutions and cultures and also documents
how some of these barriers have been overcome through negotiation.
When Nebraska pioneers in the United States experienced a shortage of
locally available building materials in the late 1800s, they were able to draw
on the recent invention of mechanical hay-baling equipment, enabling them
to use hay bales like giant building blocks to build everything from
churches to houses. Hence, the hay-baling machines were then and are now
part of what has been termed in science and technology studies heteroge-
neous engineering: the simultaneous construction of the network of people
and things that is produced while it facilitates the development and pro-
duction of a technology (Law 1987; Callon 1986; Latour 1987). Straw bale
builders build networks that include, among other things, farmers who grow
crops that produce straw, baling technology to convert straw in the field to
building-grade straw bales, transport and moisture-proof storage for the
bales, designers and plans particular to the medium, and, finally, knowl-
edgeable people and tacit knowledge of the peculiarities involved in putting
all these things together into a house. They also have to negotiate building
codes that will allow them to use the technology.
The approach I take here, a “sociology of translation” (Brown and
Capdevila 1999), focuses not only on the evolving heterogeneous network
of the straw bale movement but also on the necessity of translation between
that network and the network of locally constituted building regulation
enforcement. Local building regulations enforcement is made up of pub-
lished national building codes, regional variations and additions, and
regional norms embodied in the practices of code officials; these, in turn,
are informed by traditional testing and building conventions, all applicable
in circumscribed spatial areas that differ in scale from state to state, with
some being defined at the city and county level and some at the state level.
Translation between these networks was contingent and messy, requiring
agents dedicated to the task of mediation before the concerns of either
building officials or straw bale advocates could be understood, each by the
other. Because these translations produced standards judged by the parties
involved as adequate, though flawed, the straw bale building phenomenon
itself continues to grow. As of 1997, the straw bale movement could claim
at least one building using the technique in every state of the United States

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 264
as well as a few located in Canada, Russia, and France. Today, the straw
bale registry lists approximately 1,020 straw bale structures worldwide,
most built after 2000.3
Methods and Theory
In my research, I follow Haraway’s (1988) reformulation of objectivity

by paying close attention to situated action and by representing multiple
points of view on the grounds that the richest form of knowledge is that
situated in practice (Lave 1988; Suchman 1987; Hutchins 1995). Just as the
practices of sketching and drawing (Henderson 1991, 1995, 1999; Ferguson
1992; Latour 1986) are often the locus of technical knowledge, so too are
values and ethics expressed in how practice is carried out (Harris, Pritchard,
and Rabins 2000). The findings presented here are based on ethnographic
fieldwork with straw bale building communities in Texas, New Mexico, and
Arizona, all areas enjoying significant growth in ecology-oriented building
innovation. I use participant observation, open-ended interviews, and doc-
ument and discourse analysis. Qualitative examination of the manner in
which values are embedded in the everyday practices of grassroots innova-
tors and building code officers reveals the construction and negotiation of
what it is to have a healthy and safe built environment. I attended Straw
Bale Association meetings in Texas and green building and natural building
conferences and symposia in Texas, Maryland, and New Mexico. I inter-
viewed straw bale home owners, contractors, designers, architects, and
Department of Energy evaluators; surfed the straw net and conversed with
members of the movement in person and via electronic means; and partic-
ipated in straw bale wall raisings and plastering to find out how one
becomes an “expert” straw bale builder. I also examined the archival docu-
ments of the New Mexico Construction Industries Division (CID) and inter-
viewed building officials in Arizona and New Mexico who were active
during the time the straw bale standards were developed. Participant obser-
vation during community building provides the necessary rich base of data
to track the passing of tacit or unarticulated knowledge between individu-
als against a background of relevant context. In-depth interviews add the
dimension of individual experience and reveal members’ meanings and values
as embedded in the discourse of their narrative accounts. Examination of
the archives of the early straw bale movement in Tucson facilitated one
contextual reading of the discourses embedded in early newsletters, while
examination of the New Mexico CID documents provided another reading of

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 265
the events of that period. These data collection methods facilitated capturing
some of the multiple perspectives of participants involved in the code-
building process through citations from their own accounts: in Arizona,
reviewing documents with the founders of “Out on Bale,” the original straw
bale information dissemination network, and in New Mexico, reviewing
archives with the official who served as mediator between activists, build-
ing officials, and the home builders’ lobby. Obviously, not all perspectives
are represented here, but the multiple perspectives provided enable the
reader to become aware of some part of the complexity of the various net-
works and negotiations engaged here.
Defining Years of the Contemporary Straw Bale

Renaissance: Redefining a Past Practice
Based on Scarcity into a Discourse
of Conservation for the Present
The late 1960s and early 1970s brought both a counterculture and
professional interest in innovative and vernacular building, often using
recycled or waste materials. An early example of research on such folk and
vernacular Nebraska architecture was Roger Welsch’s (1973) one-page,
illustrated article “Baled Hay” in the book of essays titled Shelter. Straw
bale lore credits Welsch’s one short article as doing more to launch the
straw bale building revival than any other single factor. Of course, any such
information must enter a fertile environment to have an impact. Straw bale
activists have drawn on historical materials from Welsch and their own
research to create a historical discourse of legitimation. The 1970s were a
period of questioning authority on all fronts, including in architecture. It
was also the period in which ecological concerns were more widely intro-
duced to the public. The ethos of the 1960s and 1970s rebellious years is an
important factor here. For it was at this juncture that two different groups,
both still important to the 1990s straw bale movement, with two very dif-
ferent sets of values set off in different directions. One, the rebellious coun-
terculture, disenchanted with the status quo, went its own way, off the
beaten path, experimenting with, among other things, building with inex-
pensive, recycled, and found materials.4 In the meantime, architectural
innovators and those who simply wanted to build shelter as cheaply as pos-
sible began experimenting with straw bales as a building material, drawing
on Welsh’s article. But historic information by itself was not enough infor-
mation to actually build a straw bale house.

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 266
Numerous trips to Nebraska to examine construction techniques proved

frustrating on the technical level for would-be straw bale builders, even if
they did provide historic examples of straw bale structures still standing.
Myhrman and Knox (1993), who made several research trips to Nebraska,
reported that most participants who assisted in raising original straw bale
buildings are now deceased and those few that remain were quite young at
the time of construction. The few buildings that could be inspected for con-
struction details without harming the structure revealed a very rudimentary
pinning technique, consisting mainly of short stakes holding the bales
together. Hence, the experimentation of contemporary straw bale innova-
tors was crucial in developing a viable technology. Reports elicited from
some of those who lived in the historic straw bale structures introduced an
element of the discourse of the straw bale movement: emphasis on energy
conservation provided by the superinsulation qualities of straw bale walls.5
From the historic accounts come two elements that are part of the “green”
or conservation discourse of straw bale advocates: the recycling of waste or
readily available natural material and reduced energy use.
A particularly influential experimental building for professional builders
was architect Jon Hammond’s straw bale post and beam cottage described
in a widely disseminated article in Fine Homebuilding (Strang 1984). This
publication and Welsch’s (1973) previous one-page article in Shelter are
early hallmarks because their respective audiences are representative of two
networks and discourses still present today: grassroots innovators and pro-
fessional architects and contractors. Both have contributed to the growth of
the straw bale movement. The Fine Homebuilding article inspired a number
of future leaders of the contemporary straw bale movement, many of whom
met at a 1989 permaculture workshop in Oracle, Arizona, where the initial
endeavor to create consistent and best methods for bale buildings was
undertaken. This was a crucial juncture in the development and exchange
of tacit knowledge along with the development of a fairly consistent prac-
tice (which would continue to evolve) as well as the initial structuring of a
network for dissemination and advocacy of the technique, now expressed in
a discourse of green ethics. A newsletter that eventually turned into The
Last Straw Journal, started by Matts Myhrman and Judy Knox of Tucson,
disseminated technical information, helped hold the group together, and
began developing the ecological discourse.
The 1990s saw a proliferation of straw bale buildings of all shapes and
sizes throughout North American, European, and Asian countries along
with the move to standardize the technique and make it more widely available

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 267
through the establishment of building codes. The groundwork for straw

bale building permits was laid in Tucson, Arizona, through the collabora-
tion of straw bale advocates and a helpful building code culture. The code
development process was started at almost the same time in New Mexico in
a building code culture in disarray because of fiscal neglect and state poli-
tics. Comparison of the two processes reveals the importance of local situ-
ational context. The initial testing of straw bale techniques came out of
these two code negotiations. The process of testing itself was locally con-
tingent and influenced by the values, discourse, and composition of local
straw bale associations, their professional status, their economic resources,
their relationships with the local building regulation officials, and the dis-
course of safety ethics in those offices. Individual straw bale home builders
also had an impact. Holding a whole range of values, they expressed them
in choices to build toward two extremes: small modest dwellings modeling
conservation or large architectural showplaces that helped legitimate straw
building as a respectable technique.
For early innovation and experimentation building “off the grid,” with-
out benefit of code or using the technical “experimental” designation was
advantageous, as no building codes for straw bale building existed and
innovators did not have to contend with what they perceived as codes
designed for timber-based construction. However, for straw bale building
to move into the mainstream, codes were necessary. Straw bale advocates
were not looking merely for permission but for a code of their own for three
reasons. (1) Cognizant of what had happened to the budding solar energy
movement, that unskilled and sometimes unscrupulous entrepreneurs had
damaged the reputation of solar-powered products by promoting inferior
and sometimes nonfunctional technology and incorrect or misleading infor-
mation, straw bale activists wanted to ensure that those who employed
straw bale building technology were held to a standard that would ensure
the success of the technique and hence its overall reputation. (2) Beyond
building permits, bank loans and insurance availability are usually tied to
building code requirements. (3) A standardized building code would lend
credibility to the technique.
Initiating the Code Process
In 1991, when Matts Myhrman and Judy Knox, primary leaders in the
straw bale movement, decided to employ the new technique that they had

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 268
learned at the Oracle permaculture workshop to build a small straw bale

dwelling for Matts’s mother on the back of their property in Tucson, Arizona,
Myhrman went to the local building office to seek a permit. Discussing the
values that have permeated their activism and leadership in the straw bale
movement, both employ a discourse of ecological responsibility.
Knox: You’ve got to be sourced by something other than straw bale con-
struction . . . you’ve got to have a broader context that it connects to, that
excites you and makes you want to get up every morning and do the
drudge work, because the work is 99 percent drudge. The thing that is dri-
ving you is not the drudge; it’s something very different. . . . I think there’s
been a very underlying, I speak for me personally, source of planetary
awareness—of saying: We need to dramatically change the way we meet
our basic needs as human beings because we are consuming the planet.
There will not be enough of the planet left for our grandchildren.
Myhrmann: You won’t find that in any other building technology movement.
That these people who are leading it are driven by a much larger, I think,
awareness. They see straw bale construction as beautiful in itself and a
very interesting technology, but its real power and excitement is it relates
so well to many of the planetary problems.
Asked to articulate the values that drove his participation in the code devel-
opment, David Eisenberg, the other primary activist in Tucson, emphasized
the building of trust between straw bale and code communities: “People
have this sort of image of building officials as being these petty bureaucrats
and tyrants . . . basically forcing people to do all sorts of things they don’t
want to do, and in many cases that is what’s going on. They also are, as we
have begun to call them, a caring community, a group of people who takes
extremely seriously their responsibility of protecting the public welfare
from the building environment.”
The discourse of ecological responsibility worked in Tucson where
openness to seeing and exploring something new for ecological and eco-
nomic reasons seemed to permeate both the building office and the straw
bale advocate groups from the beginning. Building officials, after initial,
rather jovial amazement, engaged in a willingness to seriously consider
straw bale technology and to advise on a homemade testing endeavor.
Straw bale advocates, with a very minimal budget and a large amount of
creativity, managed to produce the required testing. Before discussing these
tests, it is useful to consider the origins of building code officials’ discourse
of health and safety.

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 269
Building Codes in Cultural Context: A Discourse

of Health, Safety, and Property
The guardians of building standards today are credentialed profession-

als, many of whom have worked in the building industry itself. The ten-
dency toward standardization is prominent, with provisions made for local
contingencies. Also prominent is a discourse emphasizing health and
safety.
Our mission was to protect consumers from bad construction, old laws, or old
building codes and to update. We were more or less a consumer advocate and
represented all the people as to functions and performance of the construc-
tion industry. (Retired CID counsel member, NM)
Number one, the primary function of the building codes is to provide a safe
building. . . . I believe that if it can be shown that a material can meet the
structural and fire safety provisions of the code, what difference does it make
what the material is? (Leroy Sayre, retired chief building official, Tucson, AZ)
Leroy Sayre, then Tucson chief building official, recounts his first encounter
with Matts Myhrman and the introduction of straw bales as a serious build-
ing technique.
Matts Myhrman came into the office and wanted to know if the county would
consider straw bale construction. My first reaction was: which one of the
little pigs are you? We still get a chuckle over that. But the more I thought
about it the more I thought there was a possibility that something could be
done. I spent my summers as a youngster in Ohio at my grandfather’s farm
and we used to stack up bales of hay and it was nice and cool [inside the
structure] in the summer. So the more I thought about it, the more I thought
well, gee, we stack up bricks, why can’t we stack up straw bales? . . . I started
thinking back on that and I thought there should be no reason if things were
done so the structural forces referred to in the codes were accounted for, there
is a possibility that any material could be used, not only straw bales. If you
could meet the forces in the code with any kind of material, I think a build-
ing official should be willing to at least consider the possibility of whatever
the alternative material is.
Aside from his cultural sympathy for straw bales, based on his boyhood
farm days, when Sayre says, if things were “done so the structural forces

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 270
referred to in the codes were accounted for,” he is referring to testing of the

materials that will give numeric outcomes. So here we begin to hear the dis-
course of standardization through standard practice and testing evidence as
ethics for the building office and as legitimation for the straw bale activists.
How Do You Standardize a Bale of Straw?

Tucson “Rustic Testing”
Both in the quotes above and in an article for The Last Straw Journal,
advising straw bale builders how to approach their local building office,
Sayre suggests an analogy between straw bales and other materials that are
stacked as a building technique, such as bricks and blocks. Employing the
language of Van de Poel and Van Gorp (2006 [this issue]), which draws on
Vincenti (1992), Sayre’s recommendation of standardized International
Congress of Building Officials (ICBO) testing of bales represents the taking
of a radical and ill-structured design/building technique and attempting to
fit it into a normative framework where it will be easy to ethically ascertain
safety issues. If the straw bales can be standardized, then normative methods
of calculation can be employed. Ordinarily, a new material is tested in ICBO-
approved labs, with the costs paid by the developing industry. Certain stress
levels for each individual piece, say a cement block, are calculated. These
individual numbers can then be manipulated accordingly to figure the loads
a whole wall can bear. But testing in such labs is very expensive, and no
particular industry is responsible for manufacturing straw bales. Farmers as
the producers of baled straw were certainly in no position nor had any
desire to conduct such tests. Moreover, bales are irregular in dimension and
density. Obviously, criteria were going to be difficult to define for straw
bales, but it was clear that testing would have to be done as the code offi-
cials in both Arizona and New Mexico advised it. Tests in the two states
were quite different.
In Tucson, the straw bale activists did test individual bales, but they also
opted to test whole straw bale wall assemblies because they felt that it was
not the bales alone that needed to be legitimized but the building technique
as a system. In so doing, using Vincenti’s language of technical hierarchy,
they seemingly moved from a fairly normal, fairly low level in the hierar-
chy to a radical, fairly high level. A single straw bale cannot be completely
normative even though testing attempts to make it so. A whole system using
straw bales would certainly fall into the radical category. However, activists
sought to mitigate this by citing its historical precedence as a building mate-
rial, which carried some weight with code officials. Even more problematic

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 271
for categorization, the straw bale wall is actually a hybrid when built into a
building. The roof and floor on a straw bale house are standard, but the way
they are tied into the wall is not. The electrical wiring is standard, but the
need for all wires to be sheathed in plastic pipe and the way switch and out-
let boxes are mounted to protect the straw bales from any potential short is
different. Windows and doors are standard, but the framing for them is not,
especially on a load-bearing wall for which some sort of heavy lintel is used
to carry the weight of the wall and roof above any openings. In light of all
this uncertainty, testing was the only answer.
Straw bale advocates built wall structures for three tests, advised by build-
ing officials that the walls needed to be tested for load, wind sheer, and lateral
sheer. A small amount of funds was raised through the straw bale network,
and the straw bale advocates built the apparatus using borrowed materials.
Eisenberg and Myhrman worked closely with local officials to coordinate a
structural wall-testing program conducted by an engineering graduate student,
Ghailene Bou-Ali, from Tunisia, recruited from the University of Arizona. The
straw bale team built the apparatus to test load, wind sheer, and lateral sheer.
Under the watchful eyes of building officials, Eisenberg, Myhrman, and crew
built a bleacher-like apparatus with numerous pails, attached by pulleys with
ropes running through the bales in an assembled straw bale wall and held by
boards on the opposite side to test for vertical loading. The pails were then
loaded with sand to apply force to the wall. For the in-plane sheer test, bags of
cement were used as a weight pulling against the wall. For the compression
test, a scalelike apparatus with slings the length of the wall on each side were
loaded with layer upon layer of galvanized steel sheeting. Each of the tests was
done three times, requiring the building of nine separate straw bale walls and
much brute labor to load and unload the test equipment.
These activist groups were certainly networks, but their success
depended on materials and people beyond their own group. Fortunately for
the straw bale advocates, the broader building culture of Tucson itself,
where building officials were already accustomed to adobe building as
an alternative to construction industry practice, set a precedent of open-
mindedness for innovation with highly placed building officials. Leroy
Sayre, chief building official of Pima County, Arizona, has stated that the
testing calculated by Bou-Ali, even though just a student’s master’s thesis
and “although relatively primitive,” still was accepted as “showing that the
material could withstand the wind loads, and to a certain degree the seismic
loads anticipated by the building code” and “became the basis for the develop-
ment of prescriptive standards in the building code for the use of straw bales
as a construction material” (Sayre 1996, 1).6

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 272
To recap, the values discourse of the straw bale advocates that facilitated
this fairly normative three-year time sequence included an ecological dis-
course and a trust discourse that drove their ethics in the development of the
technology along with consideration of building officials as a caring com-
munity. The chief building official, who influenced others in the commu-
nity of building officials, employed a normative discourse of health and
safety but was also open to innovation, informed by practical concern for
replacements for steadily weakening timber and an ethical attempt to adapt
an ill-structured, radical building system into normative practice that would
render it approvable as a low-level material. The testing outcome was a
compromise between the evaluation of single bales and whole-wall systems.
In New Mexico, a state that takes pride in the heritage of historic adobe
building traditions, as does Arizona, and also takes pride in its reputation
for the many alternative building innovations that have been initiated there,
the door also appeared open to innovation, as reflected in this statement by
one of the early CID liaisons between the straw bale advocates and the
building regulation community.
New Mexicans have always been a sort of pioneering people. So finding a

way to make do with things that come from nature has a special appeal, and
it appeals to all economic sectors. That was the reason it was easy in a place
as close to the earth as Santa Fe to get that impetus and support for that kind
of endeavor. In a lot of ways they always wanted to compare it to adobe. Not
that it isn’t similar, it was a different sort of construction, but it has that same
appeal. (Early CID-appointed liaison to Straw Bale Task Force)
Virginia Carabelli’s house near Tesuque, New Mexico, built in 1991,

was the first insured, bank-financed straw bale structure and also the first
built with a building permit, an experimental one. About the same time, the
Straw Bale Construction Association (SBCA) was organized in Santa Fe,
New Mexico, bringing together professionals committed to straw bale
design and building. Also advised to test, this activist group successfully
sponsored a small-scale fire test and transverse load test for straw bale
building in a professional laboratory and ultimately succeeded in getting
straw bale construction guidelines into New Mexico building codes. It took
seven years. To understand why the New Mexico building code took so long
to develop, we must turn again to situational context. Each building permit
office has its own culture, depending on its geographical region and its local
personality and leadership, as David A. Mann (1996, 5), codes administrator
for the city of Tucson, pointed out: “Every building department, like any

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 273
other organization, has a culture. Some depend on facts and calculation,

others are more interested in construction community input, and still others
are interested in what other departments are doing.”
Building Office Organization and Culture
New Mexico: Overcoming Politics, Organizational

Chaos, and Miscommunication
Having granted the first experimental straw bale permit to Carabelli in
1991 and responding to a petition by the SBCA, made up of professional
contractors and architects, the New Mexico CID issued ten experimental
permits for non-load-bearing straw bale structures, followed by ten more,
the demand for the experimental permits being so great. However, since
straw bale building techniques are different from mainstream construction,
local building officials would not have known how to evaluate the process
and its outcome, hence the need for a specific set of standards. Moreover,
in New Mexico, shortly after the construction of the initial modest straw
bale structures, an elite clientele emerged interested in high-end straw bale
homes. Building professionals sought codes because they needed their
legitimation in this market. They brought a proposal for a straw bale build-
ing code to the CID. The director established a task force made up of
knowledgeable builders and building office officials. He told the SBCA
members it would be a time-consuming process of about two years. That
was in 1991. The code was finally passed in 1997. To understand this long
delay, it is necessary to understand what else was happening at the CID dur-
ing this time period. In the state of New Mexico, the head of the CID is a
political appointment, as are all the positions on the Building Commission,
which is made up of experienced leaders in construction, one from each
area of construction plus an architect, a labor representative, and a citizen
at large. So too, the head of licensing and regulation, to whom the head of
the CID reports, is a political appointment. The current director of the CID
explained the effect of its interlocking structure:
If you look at it from one kind of standpoint you have a check and balance
system. If you want to look at it as mildly friendly you would say you have
a [balanced] system. If you don’t like it you would say we have anarchy
and chaos because no one knows who’s in charge. The superintendent and
the director hire and fire and have exclusive control. . . . The commission

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 274
has exclusive authority over policy-making as it relates to rules, regulations,

disciplinary actions, licensing, etc.
Asked how this works in practice, the director replied,
It’s easy if the personalities don’t change. But it can be extremely adversar-
ial. The commission will almost always, at some point, align their decisions
and thinking patterns commensurate with [industry]. That, many times, is
opposite or not in alignment with the position of the executives. Where it
really becomes apparent is when the commission feels that the executive is
attempting to get the commission to adopt social policy . . . [such as] model
energy code, radon code . . . because these are viewed as social, not life saving.
Now that’s not to say that everyone wouldn’t agree that you would want to
lower the national dependence on foreign oil by having a good energy
program or lower the out-gassing to create a better environment. . . . What the
commission generally says is that it is for someone else to do, our primary
function is life saving.
So here we see one of the first potential areas of conflict between building
officials and straw bale activists. Changes in the Uniform Building Code
during this period were already mandating energy-use awareness, while CID
personnel felt that that was not what building code enforcement was about.
However, updating the local code to include the model energy code (and
also the Americans with Disabilities Act) during this period was far from
the total of their concerns. They were in fiscal and organizational crisis.
All the fees for permits and contractors’ licenses that the CID collects
must be turned over to the state. These go into the state general fund, and
the CID is then given a budget by the legislature. In 1991, when the straw
bale building code was first proposed, the CID and its building inspectors
had a poor reputation with the building community. Building inspectors
were regarded as poorly informed, arrogant, and prejudiced against non-
locals. They were also grossly underpaid. Their vehicles were falling apart,
and their operating budget was inadequate. During the period from 1991 to
1995, members of the Straw Bale Task Force, including SBCA members,
building officials, and representatives of the Homebuilder’s Association,
felt frustrated as they tried to move forward in negotiating a straw bale
building standard. The SBCA brought materials to meetings and thought
it was providing the information needed to create a code, only to be told
it needed more each time.7 The groups kept talking past one another,
becoming more and more alienated from one another as time went on.

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 275
A sense of this frustration can be seen in the following quotes from the CID
liaison to the straw bale committee at that time.
The intent was to have open discussions and get direction. They didn’t know
how to handle it to make it work. The alternative methods of materials were
the approach that I thought would be easiest and most expeditious. All they
[Straw Bale Association] really managed to do was develop these experimen-
tal permits but hadn’t really done anything else. They had all these buildings
done but had not gathered any information to really substantiate any codes
for the mainstream process. So many of them are really how each building
was built. . . . There is no performance standard to apply stucco to straw. Nor
had any of the stucco manufacturers been asked to provide data, which would
give the building officials anything to hang their hat on. . . . The way we were
doing it, we had a wall that feels pretty good, but there was no way to deter-
mine if this stucco is really performing in the way it is supposed to. That’s
why we were trying to keep some references, to note performance. . . . The
way the straw bale people wanted to do it was to apply the stucco and say it’s
okay. In order to approve that, the code official couldn’t do it, unless the pro-
prietary stucco manufacturer had to say, yes, this is an acceptable method for
applying stucco to straw. A lot of these concerns, that’s okay, but on the other
hand, in my position, someone had to be the eyes and ears for the state, to at
least make the state responsible. Stucco is one issue, there are others.
The language here, not unlike that in Tucson, advocates standardization.

But unlike Tucson, building officials did not offer to assist in helping straw
bale advocates find a home-grown, alternative method to expensive lab tests
to achieve it.
In 1995, a new governor was elected and administrative positions were
to be reappointed: Building Commission members, the head of the CID,
and the head of licensing and regulation, which oversees the CID. However,
the CID was in such disarray that no one wanted to head it. Finally, the gov-
ernor asked Anita Lockwood, an experienced administrator from Energy and
Minerals, to take the job. Several participants related that there was talk in
some quarters of a noncooperation conspiracy against her. Especially some
of the most reactionary members felt that not only was she a woman, but
she also did not know construction. However, participants report that six
months later, everyone loved her. Former CID director Lockwood herself
describes the problems she tackled using language that indicates that pro-
cedure rather than individuals was the issue:
When Governor Johnson came into office and changed all the cabinet
officials . . . it was clear that no one wanted to take the directorship of the

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 276
Construction Industry [Division]. The construction industry had a reputation

of being a nightmare. And, in fact, it was . . . in my assessment. . . . I think
it has an incredibly important public service in public safety. It has very
capable, talented people who have been largely underrated and neglected
in a professional capacity and not recognized for their talents and capabili-
ties. One of the things I wanted to do was make it more professional and
to get the resources they need to do their jobs well and adequately. That’s
where we started.
While Lockwood may not have known construction well, she did know
the state legislature and how to work with it. She bartered with the power-
ful Homebuilders Association lobby, promising better service in exchange
for supporting the needs of the CID. As one informant put it, “She told them
what to say, when they should say it and to whom.” She got a decent
budget for the CID, bought them new vehicles, and provided inspectors
with training in both the technical aspects of their job and in human rela-
tions. She elevated selected positions, requiring architects or engineers to
fill them. To their credit, the new commission had tried to accomplish some
of these things only to run into bureaucratic hurdles such as the prohibition
of changing job designations. The new CID director knew how to do the
necessary paperwork and the politics to accomplish such goals. She also
aided the various task forces, including the Straw Bale Task Force, by
requiring them to set specific goals and procedures so that the SBCA and
the CID officials could communicate across their different languages and
find closure in agreement over goals and means. Her tenure began in 1995;
in 1997, the straw bale building code was passed, taking the two years orig-
inally indicated that it should take.
During this period, the SBCA raised funds for testing by contacting
home owners, contractors, architects, and anyone interested in straw bale
building. It raised several thousand dollars to sponsor a small-scale fire test
and transverse load test for straw bale building. The SBCA did a formal pre-
sentation including not only the test results in graph format but also a color
video of the testing process. The segment in which the stucco wall, against
which an industrial grade furnace torch has been applied for an hour, is
taken apart to reveal only some scorching is dramatic. Slides of historic
straw bale homes and a church, built nearly one hundred years ago, were used
as additional evidence. The straw bale building technique was presented as
a low-cost technique suitable for low-income housing, which it can be, with
a lot of owner-builder participation, even though a good portion of the New
Mexico clientele is in the high-end market. It also helped that the leader and

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 277
spokesperson for the SBCA was a retired British businessman. Tony Perry’s
authoritative but friendly interaction style was familiar to the CID and the
Building Commission construction professionals and worked for SBCA’s
goals even if some of the more egalitarian-minded members of the SBCA
found him patriarchal. The straw bale building standard passed in New
Mexico, which has a state-level building code that cities and counties are
free to make more stringent, is post and beam. All structures must also have
the stamp of an engineer or an architect. Hence, it is a very conservative
code from the perspective of those who want to use less wood and to
empower individuals to build their own homes. It was, after all, sought by
a team of professionals, not grassroots builders. The initial CID liaison speaks
of the New Mexico straw bale advocates’ values as more self-interested
than the way they represented themselves while still acknowledging the
perseverance of Perry.
Tony was real instrumental in the whole process as well as a number of archi-
tects. They had commissions that were dependent upon this getting approved.
The irony I saw in all of this was that Tony and the group of proponents that
argued this to me awakened to a potential for low cost housing. They really
pushed that. Most of these houses built with straw bale were expensive.
These are not mainstream houses. There were a few built on relatively low
budgets, the majority is [sic] not. In which case why go to so much trouble,
especially in a state like New Mexico, which is where, historically, adobe has
been a recognized building material for centuries long before the building
code. In reality the actual cost of construction [for an] adobe house as com-
pared to a straw bale house, the adobe is probably less expensive. In both
cases, the problem with straw is if you have left an exposed wall, the cost of
the stucco is greatly increased by the irregularity of the wall. In the interior
of the wall you can’t just hang drywall up. Hard plaster is much more expen-
sive than gypsum drywall. You are doing this in order to supply a superior
insulated wall. But look at where all the majority of heat loss in buildings
occur[s]—it’s thru [sic] the roof/ceiling assembly, number one, number two,
the glazing, and finally the walls. So to go to all that trouble to super insulate
a wall, there are enough gaps in the whole process that it is difficult to under-
stand what the real motivation was. I tried to relate it this way to the com-
mission, and did in such a way that I think is understandable.
Obviously, the liaison, a former builder, sees the straw bale technique as
inefficient and does not connect the choice to use it to any ecological
values for using waste materials and instead challenges the ability of the
material to reduce energy use. However, Perry was regarded as a worthy

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 278
adversary by those in the CID who had misgivings about straw bale building
because he spoke the language of business and understood the need for
standardization as an ethical issue for the building officials. In the begin-
ning when standardizing the bales themselves was suggested, just as it had
been in Tucson, Perry was quite outspoken about why this would not work.
His description of the dialogue and the outcome introduces the issues of
performance and prescriptive building standards.
Preferences for Prescriptive versus Performance

Standards and Situated, Compromised Outcomes
The need for standardization ultimately leads to a discussion of perfor-

mance versus prescriptive standards.8 Here, different strategies to pursue
one or the other on the part of either straw bale advocates or building code
officials are never 100 percent effective. In addition to the different cultures
of the building offices themselves, the straw bale organizations that sought
codes in New Mexico and Arizona were also different. The Arizona group
sought a prescriptive code from their orientation as mostly grassroots
builders with a focus on sustainability, exemplified in building small and
making the straw bale technique widely available to owner-builders. They
also sought to include “Nebraska style” or load-bearing building because it
offers the opportunity for reduced wood use. While ultimately Tucson/Pima
County came up with a standard of mixed performance and prescription
criteria, Eisenberg comments why the prescriptive code was preferred there:
We went with the prescriptive code for straw bale because we felt we could
justify with historical evidence a certain set of limitations for straw bale
structures without having a huge amount of testing data to back that up, but
rather a small amount. We didn’t have nearly enough, and we still don’t have
enough data to be able to develop a performance code for straw bale con-
struction. That’s especially true when you deal with anything and there’s a lot
of variability.
He then compares the strengths and weaknesses of the prescriptive and the
performance code approaches from the perspective of the grassroots straw
bale builders in Arizona:
There are benefits of prescriptive code, one of which is it simplifies the

process. If you do this and this and this, you’re good to go. You don’t need tests,

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 279
or engineers, you have to show you’ve met the prescription. The downside of
that is if you want to do anything else, it’s difficult because everyone gets
used to the prescription. It’s so much easier to do it that way. It’s really a pain
when someone wants to change something. So there’s resistance—plus you
need to engage experts and you need to have test results. So the prescriptive
approach tends to calcify the whole system. So the performance approach is
nice because it creates all this flexibility and the potential to solve the problem
in any way you can prove as satisfactory with intent. But it involves you having
to prove it meets those criteria. That often involves testing and engineers.
The straw bale advocates in New Mexico had a different orientation. The
most vocal activists in this group were professional builders and architects.
They were interested in building innovative straw bale buildings that were
also showpieces: high-end homes that would highlight the potentials of the
materials. They had the clientele to support such buildings—homes that
were simultaneously luxurious, innovative, and seen as sustainable. At the
same time, they also made the argument that straw bale homes could be
built for low-income groups. Indeed, a number of straw bale architects, not
only in New Mexico, have pointed out the necessity to illustrate that a new
technique is desirable for high-end homes to convince agencies and indi-
viduals that straw bale is not a second-class technique when they propose it
for building low-income housing. The New Mexico advocate-professionals
thought that getting the CID to pass a code for load-bearing straw bale
buildings would be too difficult. They sought a post-and-beam code that
was based on performance. Participants noted that professionals often
prefer a performance code because it leaves more decisions up to them,
and they in turn take the responsibility that the building will perform up to
safe standards.
The following quote from Perry illustrates how New Mexico code offi-
cials’ drive to test single straw bales to standardize them and move them
into a more normal, low-level position in the technical hierarchy—for
ethical consideration as building materials—ultimately resulted in the CID
personnel themselves coming up with a quite creative performance code for
bales, although the code itself is a mixture of both prescriptive and perfor-
mance demands:
When they’re writing the code, there’re two ways of doing it. There are per-
formance standards. And there are “this is how you do it” standards. . . . And
the argument that went on was that we wanted the standards written in such
a way that we got the right performance out of it all. But we didn’t want to

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 280
necessarily tell people how to do it—because that stifles innovation. And the
code actually came out as a compromise between the two. For example, one
of the things that was an early issue was, how do you test the compression of
bales. And clearly if a bale is baled too loosely, it’s not much use. If it’s baled
too tightly, you’ve driven all the air out of it and it’s not so good from an insu-
lation point of view. Baling machines, of which there are eight different vari-
eties, have settings, which are totally arbitrary, going from sort of zero to six
hundred. And we went and took a field of wheat and tried all sorts of differ-
ent settings. We came to the conclusion that it didn’t matter much as long as
you weren’t at either extreme, as long as you were somewhere in the middle.
And the CID started off saying, we need to get the farmers to certify every
bale, a tag put on it. Can you see farmers doing that? . . I said to them, “That
is impossible!” There are eight different machines. All right? There are six
hundred settings on each machine. There are wheat, rye, oats, barley, and rice
[straw bales]. And there are probably three or four hundred different climatic
conditions on which it might be cut and baled. No way. So we ended up with
a very practical thing. And the CID came up with it. They said, all right, pick
up a two-string bale, by one string, and if you can walk twenty-five feet with-
out it falling apart, it’s good enough. And I thought, Wow, that’s sensible.
Isn’t that nice. Now that’s a performance standard, right? . . . If they say it’s
got to be a compression setting of 125, plus or minus 5 percent, that’s not a
performance standard. And if you read the code, you will see where it is a
combination of both.
The New Mexico performance code reads much as Perry describes it:
8.2.A.5 COMPRESSION: All bales shall be field tested for compression

before placement in walls. Bales shall be of sufficient compression to remain
intact when lifted by one baling wire or poly-propylene twine and transport-
ing it manually a minimum of 25 feet while suspended by one wire or twine.
In contrast, Arizona straw bale activists wanted a prescriptive code to

facilitate nonprofessional owner-builders’ ability to build with straw bale by
just following the prescriptions in the standard. Comparison of some of the
language in the final drafts of the two codes illustrates segments in which
the difference is both prominent and less so. The Arizona code may not be
able to require standardized bales, but it does propose a formula, tool, and
technique for standardizing density.
7204.1.6 Density. Bales in load-bearing structures shall have a minimum cal-

culated dry density of 7.0 pounds per cubic boot. The calculated dry density

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 281
shall be determined after reducing the actual bale weight by the weight of
the moisture content, as determined in section 7204.1.5. The calculated dry
density shall be determined by dividing the calculated dry weight of the bale
by the volume of the bale.
The goals of the Arizona and New Mexico straw bale advocates not with-
standing, retired chief building official Leroy Sayre suggests that purely
performance codes may be impossible even as he states his preferences
for them:
I believe that if it can be shown that a material can meet the structural and
fire safety provisions of the code, what difference does it make what the
material is? It can be spaghetti for all I care. As long as they can show it will
meet the fire safety and structural materials of the code. But they have to
show that by tests. . . . I don’t know how they’re ever going to write a true
performance code without proscriptive requirements in it. . . . They’ve been
working on it for over fifty years and they haven’t done it yet.
In fact, this morning I was thinking the uniform building code was first
published in 1922 so that’s seventy-eight years.
Further examples show that both Arizona and New Mexico created mixed
codes even though to a degree, the Arizona standard leans toward prescrip-
tive language and New Mexico toward performance, though not so thor-
oughly as the rhetoric of each states’ advocates suggests. The New Mexico
“performance” code prescribes exact limits on the types of straw that
may be used. The Arizona “prescriptive” code mentions the same types
of straw but explicitly sets no limits with the phrase “including but not
limited to,” leaving a wide space for additional straw material, hardly a
prescriptive stance.
The point is not that these codes fail in their intent to be performance or
prescription in format but that, just as Sayre states, such purity is almost
impossible to achieve, and hence both codes are actually a mix of perfor-
mance and prescriptive standards, not surprising given their culturally situ-
ated and negotiated nature.
Mediation and Structure
Mediators were crucial to the technical and ethical discussions at the detail
level, perceived so differently by straw bale advocates versus conventional

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 282
builders and code officials, used to normative testing procedures and

prescriptive standards as a way to ensure ethical judgments. In contrast,
straw bale advocates were driven by their ethic of using less wood and more
waste materials to conserve the earth’s resources and to render the new
technique simple, nontoxic, and cheap. Straw bale codes exist in these two
states because such mediators were present. They came from both sides. In
Tucson, straw bale advocate Eisenberg, himself an experienced building
engineer with several prominent buildings as credentials, convinced straw
bale advocates to work with their local code office while engaging in exten-
sive networking in the ICBO. His early collaboration with open-minded
code officials and his advocacy of a larger sphere of responsibility for
building codes have ultimately resulted in his being invited to become of
member of the ICBO itself, to help develop new sustainable building codes.
In New Mexico, the leadership of Lockwood in reorganizing the CID,
based on her ethics of creating a level playing field and belief in the
integrity of her staff and the straw bale advocates, resulted in placing a tal-
ented young building official with good communication skills, trained in
architecture and experienced in a family building trade, as the new liaison
for developing the straw bale building standards. The outcome was not only
the New Mexico straw bale building standard but also a format for bringing
new and indigenous building techniques into a code structure that allows
for their ethical consideration and personnel with the knowledge of how to
do it.9 The New Mexico and Tucson/Pima County straw bale building stan-
dards themselves embody a combination of prescription- and performance-
based codes, each a different compromise, achieved through locally situated
culture, practice, material culture, values, and ethics.
Negotiating a Difficult Fit between Standards and

a Recalcitrant Organic Technology: Policy
Implications for Engineering Ethics?
“Classifications should be recognized as the significant site of political

and ethical work that they are. Everyday categories are precisely those that
have disappeared into infrastructure, habit, into the taken for granted. These
are seamlessly interwoven with formal, technological categories and spec-
ifications” (Bowker and Star 1999, 319).
What policy implications might design engineering draw from this
ethnography of two particular cases that did not adhere to existing ideas

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 283
about how to apply ethics of safe building to “new/old” technology?10 While

standardization of the technique for building with straw bales was the ultimate
goal of the advocates, the ethical discourse, from their point of view, was
not so much about the building standard per se but about the values dis-
course driving the endeavor. Indeed, as Freidson (1986) and others such as
Bowker and Star (1999) have pointed out, standardization, established by
the “good gray members” of a profession, has tended to set standards that
facilitate the interests of the industry or company they represent. In this
case, straw bale advocates needed the legitimation that standards provided
to obtain financing, insurance, and investment as well as to ensure that
builders used straw bale in a viable fashion. Correct use could then reflect
positively on the technique so that the advocates themselves could express
their values through building structures representing energy and materials
conservation. That this was not a perfect solution is illustrated in that some
value discourses such as visual and ecological discourses could not be
assimilated into the health and safety discourse of building offices.
Assurance that builders employ local materials, consuming minimal fuel
for delivery to conserve energy and reduce pollution, is part of neither
state’s straw bale building standard nor are requirements for a minimal use
of timber to conserve forests. What was intended to be accomplished was
both legitimation of the technique and minimal standards that would make
a viable version of the technique more widely available. On the other hand,
for the building code officials, the setting of standards was deeply con-
nected to their values discourse because it is through standards that they
feel the safety of a building, their charge, is ensured. However, they had
limited discourses and techniques for ascertaining such safety for this par-
ticular building technique as those they normally employed originated from
the construction and insurance industries. But such embeddedness is actu-
ally more complicated.
Mediators can make a great difference in making otherwise silenced
voices heard and help reveal that even when standards are cloaked in invis-
ible habits, they can still be changed. Those involved in creating straw bale
codes drew on preexisting categories, some more than others, while the
mediators and a will to facilitate change make this story of standardization
one of negotiation rather than silencing.
Bowker and Star (1999, 283) stated that “categories are tied to the things
people do, to the worlds to which they belong. In large scale systems those
worlds come into conflict.” Since building code officials’ values for ensur-
ing the safety of a building were grounded in the setting of standards, the

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 284
process was limited by conventions from the building industry that had
“disappeared into infrastructure, habit, and the taken for granted” (p. 319)
before the work of mediators. The actions, interactions, and resulting codes,
along with the introduction of new discourses of ecology and sustainabil-
ity, different in the two states discussed, have themselves contributed to the
construction of policy in their respective settings. Having once worked
through the immense difficulties of negotiating different discourses that
embody different ethics of safe building in each state, the groups involved
ultimately negotiated usable building codes for building with straw bales.
Activists in both states admit this code is not perfect, as many attest as they
go through updating it to include more recent refinements in technique. In
the process of negotiating, testing, and building the code, a discourse and
process structure were created that now serve as a model for future innova-
tions using other organic, nonstandardizable, materials. This research has
shown the basting and tailoring leading up to what Bowker and Star
described as the ultimate seamless interweaving of existing formal, techno-
logical categories and specifications. This process has become an infra-
structure itself, becoming the model for rammed earth and other innovations,
while the CID liaison officer who facilitated the negotiations in New
Mexico is regarded as an expert to be consulted by other states seeking to
bring indigenous building techniques under code.
Is there, then, something useful from what has been learned in these
settings that speaks to engineering design in terms of the importance of
empirical information for developing standards for ethical considera-
tions? I would propose the following: (1) Attention to ethics in practice
reveals that what may be regarded as ethical practice may be based as
much in everyday convention as in values. (2) Groups that embrace dif-
ferent public charges and engage in different practices may find more
conflict in their discourse and practices than in their actual values. They
may find common ground despite differing conventions and values with
the help of mediators. (3) Organizational structure and culture are tied to
classification and standardization and so can make a great difference in
communication and perceptions about values and ethics. (4) Preconceived
notions of just how ethical considerations are to be undertaken, especially
conventions following rigid norms, can be problematic when faced with
materials that do not fit preconceived notions or categories. However,
such categories for classifying and judging materials and processes for
ethical considerations should not be abandoned but rather used as a point
of departure to develop innovative ways to judge new technologies. (5) A
sense of flexibility, even a sense of play, can be very useful in dealing

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 285
with new technologies that do not adhere easily to existing categories or

conventions of standardization.
New technologies are constructed in multifaceted networks and com-
munities of practice in which creative action and design work are con-
strained by myriad conventions and requirements at the same time that
flexibility and opportunities for actual play with the emerging technology
are encouraged. Clearly, innovation in technology that emerges from such
situated and contingent environments needs to be judged by standards and
codes that also incorporate flexibility without compromising concerns for a
healthy and safely built environment. This means that classification cate-
gories and even the definition of what a healthy and safe environment is
need to be regarded as points of departure rather than rigid standards. Even
what form a standard should take—performance, prescriptive, a combina-
tion of the two, or some other as-yet-unimagined configuration or hybrid—
may not have a single right answer. Rather, like design work that is
composed of messy, mixed practices (Henderson 1999; Vinck 2003), so too
should codes develop from situated contexts that foster a combination of
performance and prescriptive requirements that fit the unique characteris-
tics and uses of the materials and their given context.
Notes
1. Technically, the rules developed for building with straw bales are designated a “build-
ing standard”; however, the terms building standard and building code are used interchange-
ably throughout this article to minimize repetitive language.
2. The necessity of looking closely at ethics in situational practice is commanding
increasing attention in the engineering ethics literature (Hackett 2002; Brugge and Cole 2003;
Keulartz et al. 2004; among others). Empirical information illustrates the kinds of insights
available when we pay attention to ethics in practice, which could contribute to more empiri-
cally informed ethics of design in engineering as well as in standard setting more generally.
This article joins other scholars (Gorman, Mehalik, and Werhane 2000; Vesilind and Gunn
1998) in raising ecological concerns as ethical ones. This is a sociological study in the science
and technology studies tradition of meanings members attach to values, ethics, and technol-
ogy and how they actually enact them. Organizational norms and culture have convincingly
been shown to be crucial determinants of technological decisions and actions in a number of
studies (Vaughan 1997; Eden 2004; Meyers 2004; to name a few); here, as conveyed in dis-
course, they contribute to the ways in which materials are qualified as safe, the way building
systems are tested, and the way in which standards are expressed.
3. Information is from the Straw Bale Registry (http://sbregistry.greenbuilder.com/search.
straw). About half of the structures represented by these numbers are located in China, and
about one-third in the United States. The majority of those in the United States are located in
the southwest states that spawned the technique: Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and California,

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 286
with the addition of Colorado due to newer techniques for snow-producing climates. The large
numbers in China result from a housing project sponsored by a U.S. religious institution.
4. Not only was the vernacular architecture Shelter published during this period, so was
Rudofsky’s (1964) Architecture without Architects, which documented the beauty of indigenous
people’s building with natural materials, and Handmade Houses by Boericke and Shapiro (1973).
5. Straw bale advocate/researchers report that having discovered that stacked bale homes
were both durable and comfortable in the weather extremes of Nebraska winters and summers,
people plastered over the straw walls and made them permanent (Myhrman and Knox 1993;
Steen, Steen, and Bainbridge 1994).
6. Even with the testing barrier solved, three years of innumerable meetings and multiple
rewrites went by before the written standard was acceptable to the code review committee
(delayed also because construction work had increased in the region, spreading building offi-
cials’ time and obligation more thinly). It was approved and added to the 1994 Pima
County/City of Tucson Uniform Building Code as appendix chapter 72. On January 2, 1996,
the Pima County Board of Supervisors and the City of Tucson mayor/council adopted the 1994
edition of the Uniform Building Code, with appendix chapter 72, allowing the use of straw
bales as load-bearing walls for buildings not more than one story in height.
7. The Homebuilders Association representative and perhaps some code officials felt that
the Straw Bale Construction Association was misrepresenting its case since they were reading
other materials in straw bale publications and on straw bale Web sites advocating for a load-
bearing code such as that being pursued in Arizona, while the New Mexico straw bale organi-
zation was asking only for a post-and-beam code.
8. These are designated goal setting and prescriptive standards in the article by Coeckelbergh
(2006 [this issue]). Rosen and Heineman (1990) used methods system and results system,
which parallel the designations prescription and performance employed by participants here.
9. Former New Mexico Construction Industries Division/straw bale liaison Ramirez has
been consulted on developing building standards for rammed earth in New Mexico and by
building officials in Hawaii and elsewhere, wanting to bring indigenous building techniques into
the codes so they can be employed and judged by ethical standards, familiar to building officials.
10. Ethnographic, case study research does not usually seek to generalize beyond what can
be said about the particular setting researched, and it was not the intent of this research to do
more than illustrate what has happened when grassroots activists, employing their interpre-
tation of a “green” ethic, sought to create a building code for an innovative, but not easily stan-
dardized, process while working with building officials, whose sense of ethical safety precautions
were influenced by the conventions of the building industry. Hence, what is summarized here
is not intended to be universal since each case will have situational components as illustrated
in the Arizona and New Mexico scenarios. Awareness of such issues of messy, contingent
practice is worthy of general note.
References
Boericke, A., and B. Shapiro. 1973. Handmade houses: A guide to the woodbutcher’s art. San
Francisco: A&W Visual Library.
Bowker, G., and S. Leigh Star. 1999. Sorting things out: Classification and its consequences.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 287
Brown, S. D., and R. Capdevila. 1999. Perpetuum mobile: Substance, force, and the sociology
of translation. In Actor network theory and after, ed. J. Law and J. Hassard, 26-50. Oxford,
UK: Blackwell.
Brugge, D., and A. Cole. 2003. A case study of community-based participatory research ethics:
The healthy public housing initiative. Science and Engineering Ethics 9 (4): 485-501.
Callon, M. 1986. The sociology of an actor-network: The case of the electric vehicle. In
Mapping the dynamics of science and technology. Sociology of science in the real world,
ed. M. Callon, J. Law, and A. Rip, 72-102. London: Macmillan.
Coeckelbergh, M. 2006. Regulation or responsibility? Autonomy, moral imagination, and
engineering. Science, Technology, & Human Values 31 (3): 237-260.
Eden, L. 2004. Whole world on fire: Organization, knowledge, & nuclear weapons devastation.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Ferguson, E. 1992. Engineering and the mind’s eye. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Freidson, E. 1986. Professional powers: A study of the institutionalization of formal knowl-
edge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Gorman, M., M. Mehalik, and P. Werhane. 2000. Ethical and environmental challenges to
engineering. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Hackett, Edward J. 2002. Four observations about “six domains of research ethics.” Science
and Engineering Ethics 8:211-14.
Haraway, D. 1988. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege
of partial perspective. Feminist Studies 14:575-600.
Harris, C. E., M. S. Pritchard, and M. J. Rabins. 2000. Engineering ethics: Concepts and
cases. 2nd ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.
Henderson, K. 1991. Flexible sketches and inflexible data bases. Science, Technology, &
Human Values 16:448-73.
———. 1995 The political career of a prototype. Social Problems 42:274-99.
———. 1999. On line and on paper: Visual representations, visual culture, and computer
graphics in design engineering. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Hutchins, E. 1995. Cognition in the wild. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Keulartz, J., M. Schermer, M. Korthals, and T. Swierstra. 2004. Ethics in technological culture:
A programmatic proposal for a pragmatist approach. Science, Technology, & Human Values
29:3-29.
Latour, B. 1986. Visualization and cognition: Thinking with eyes and hands. Knowledge and
Society: Studies in the Sociology of Culture Past and Present 6:1-40.
———. 1987. Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lave, J. 1988. Cognition in practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Law, J. 1987. Technology and heterogeneous engineering: The case of Portuguese expansion.
In The social construction of technological systems, ed. W. Bijker, T. Hughes, and T. Pinch,
111-34. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Mann, D. 1996. The Baley pulpit. The Last Straw 14:5.
Meyers, C. 2004. Institutional culture and individual behavior: Creating an ethical environ-
ment. Science and Engineering Ethics 10 (2): 269-76.
Myhrman, M. and J. Knox. 1993. A brief history of hay and straw as building materials. The
Last Straw 1 (4): 1-5, 18-19.
Rosen, H., and T. Heineman. 1990. Construction specifications writing. 3rd ed. New York:
John Wiley.

ST&HV285925.qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 288
Rudofsky, B. 1964. Architecture without architects: A short introduction to non-pedigreed

architecture. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Sayre, L. 1996. One from the top. The Last Straw 14:1, 6.
Steen, A., B. Steen, and D. Bainbridge. 1994. The straw bale house. White River Junction, VT:
Chelsea Green.
Strang, G. 1984-85. Straw bale studio: A cheap, sturdy structure with good thermal perfor-
mance. Fine Homebuilding 24 (December/January): 70-72.
Suchman, L. 1987. Plans and situated actions: The problem of human-machine communica-
tion. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Van de Poel, I., and A. C. van Gorp. 2006. The need for ethical reflection in engineering design:
The relevence of type of design and design hierarchy. Science, Technology, & Human
Values 31 (3): 333-360.
Vaughan, D. 1997. The Challenger launch decision. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Vesilind, P. A., and A. S. Gunn. 1998. Engineering, ethics and the environment. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Vincenti, W. G. 1992. Engineering knowledge, type of design, and level of hierarchy: Further
thoughts about what engineers know. In Technological development and science in the
industrial age, ed. P. Kroes and M. Bakker, 17-34. Dordrecht, the Netherlands: Kluwer.
Vinck, D. 2003. Everyday engineering: An ethnography of design and innovation. Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Welsch, R. L. 1973. Baled hay. In Shelter, 70. Bolinas, CA: Shelter Publications.
Kathryn Henderson is trained in sociology and art criticism, and her research has focused on
the changing visual culture of design engineering. Her current work examines how grassroots
technical knowledge outside the mainstream, such as straw bale building, is conveyed and
legitimated.

Ethics, Culture and Structure in The Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes PDF

Caricato da

Informazioni sul documento

Titolo originale

Copyright

Formati disponibili

Condividi questo documento

Condividi o incorpora il documento

Opzioni di condivisione

Hai trovato utile questo documento?

Questo contenuto è inappropriato?

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

Ethics, Culture and Structure in The Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes PDF

Caricato da

Copyright:

Formati disponibili

ST&HV285925.

qxd 3/21/2006 11:19 AM Page 261

Science, Technology, &

Negotiation of Straw http://online.sagepub.com

Bale Building Codes

Keywords: building codes; green building; empirically informed ethics;

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

262 Science, Technology, & Human Values

David Eisenberg, regarded as the “guru of straw bale building codes”1

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 263

Finally, this is a study about how grassroots “green” techniques were

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

264 Science, Technology, & Human Values

Methods and Theory

In my research, I follow Haraway’s (1988) reformulation of objectivity

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 265

Defining Years of the Contemporary Straw Bale

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

266 Science, Technology, & Human Values

Numerous trips to Nebraska to examine construction techniques proved

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 267

through the establishment of building codes. The groundwork for straw

Initiating the Code Process

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

268 Science, Technology, & Human Values

learned at the Oracle permaculture workshop to build a small straw bale

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 269

Building Codes in Cultural Context: A Discourse

The guardians of building standards today are credentialed profession-

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

270 Science, Technology, & Human Values

referred to in the codes were accounted for,” he is referring to testing of the

How Do You Standardize a Bale of Straw?

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 271

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

272 Science, Technology, & Human Values

New Mexicans have always been a sort of pioneering people. So finding a

Virginia Carabelli’s house near Tesuque, New Mexico, built in 1991,

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 273

other organization, has a culture. Some depend on facts and calculation,

Building Office Organization and Culture

New Mexico: Overcoming Politics, Organizational

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

274 Science, Technology, & Human Values

has exclusive authority over policy-making as it relates to rules, regulations,

Asked how this works in practice, the director replied,

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 275

The language here, not unlike that in Tucson, advocates standardization.

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

276 Science, Technology, & Human Values

Construction Industry [Division]. The construction industry had a reputation

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

Henderson / Negotiation of Straw Bale Building Codes 277

Downloaded from sth.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 18, 2016

278 Science, Technology, & Human Values

Preferences for Prescriptive versus Performance