Straw house
A Home Rooted in the Earth
This project is more than a house—it is a statement on sustainability, autonomy, and architecture as an extension of nature. Built on the land, embedded in its surroundings, the Straw House is the epitome of passive design, where every element contributes to efficiency, resilience, and harmony with the environment.
Located in a mountainous, forested area near Barcelona, the house is conceived to disappear into the terrain while maintaining an elevated position to protect against humidity—a delicate balance between integration and survival.
A House That Follows the Land
Rather than imposing itself on the site, the house adapts. It is organized as a semi-buried volume, with its roof extending the landscape itself, creating a continuation of the natural terrain rather than a disruption. The architecture is not just a shelter but a mechanism for coexisting with the land, carefully designed to respond to:
- Light and heat: The south-facing patio acts as a solar collector, bringing warmth and light deep into the house.
- Wind and humidity: Raised on wooden piers, it avoids direct contact with the ground, protecting the straw walls from degradation while ventilating the structure naturally.
- The living ecosystem: The roof is alive, a green surface that supports vegetation, blending the house into its setting while regulating temperature and capturing water.
Constructing with Straw: A Deliberate Choice
Straw is a material with a future. Its use in Nebraska-style load-bearing walls allows the house to be:
- Highly insulated: The thick walls offer thermal mass, maintaining stable interior temperatures with minimal energy input.
- Economical and local: Straw bales are low-cost, widely available, and can be self-built, reinforcing the philosophy of accessible and participatory construction.
- Biodegradable and non-toxic: A house that, if left to time, would decompose back into the earth—an architecture that leaves no waste, only memory.
A Living System
This house does not consume—it participates in the cycles of its environment:
- Rainwater is captured and reused, collected through the gently sloped roof.
- Airflow is choreographed, with high thermal inertia walls regulating temperature while strategic openings allow for cross-ventilation.
- The boundary between human and non-human life dissolves, with direct transitions between the house and the open land, shared spaces between inhabitants and their animals, and an architecture that extends into the terrain rather than interrupting it.
A Home as Shelter, as Refuge, as Earth
The Straw House is not merely a low-impact dwelling—it is an argument for a different way of building, of living. It is modest in scale but ambitious in philosophy, proving that a house can be:
- Self-sustaining
- Affordable
- Responsive to its environment
- And deeply human
It is a quiet architecture, where the most radical thing is not its form, but its ability to simply exist as part of the land, rather than on top of it.
EN 
ES