Better than Bricks: A School Built of Straw

By Laurie Guevara-Stone
Issue 116, Jan/Feb 2003

Parents want schools to employ great teachers, but what about the building itself? Does it welcome their children? As many educators and parents are beginning to realize, the physical space students occupy contributes greatly to their emotional and educational experience. That is why students at the Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork, in western Colorado, spend their days in a beautiful, nurturing, passive-solar, straw-bale school.

Although the idea of building with straw may evoke images of the big bad wolf, people have been doing it for centuries. In the late 1800s, settlers in the Nebraska sand hills built their homes out of straw because they had no wood; some of their houses still stand today. Over the last decade, there has been a growing resurgence in straw-bale homes as people have come to appreciate their amazing energy efficiency and beauty.

Architect Jeff Dickinson, of Energy & Sustainable Design in Crystal Circle, Colorado , has been designing straw-bale homes since the early 1990s, and, with perseverance and imagination, has since branched out to educational facilities. In 1996 the Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork, which his seven-year-old daughter attends, decided to move to a new location and build a larger campus. They were in an old public-school building with buzzing fluorescent lights, noisy, inadequate heaters, and virtually no natural materials. They wanted buildings that were energy-efficient, light-filled, warm, and earthy. For Dickinson , straw bale was a perfect choice.

This Waldorf School now has more than 20,000 square feet of straw-bale buildings designed by Dickinson, with passive-solar heating, energy-efficient appliances, day-lighting, and natural building materials. The 13-acre campus consists of a 3,400-square-foot kindergarten, a 5,744-square-foot building for grades one through eight, and an 11,000-square-foot community hall that houses an auditorium, offices, and music and dance rooms. A 4,500-square-foot building for the upper grades is also planned.

The Waldorf education system, founded in 1919 by Austrian Rudolf Steiner, strives to awaken a child's inner being and develop his or her ability to meet the practical challenges of life. Steiner also invented anthroposophic architecture, which seeks to respond to the human form and human needs. He believed that buildings should appear in harmony with the landscape in which they are built, with regard to both form and material. Their form should reflect their function and should be both practical and artistic.

The buildings at the Waldorf School on the Roaring Fork are not only practical and artistic, but also energy-efficient and earth-friendly. The community hall's hand-carved doors depict the Norse Tree of Life, which students study in the fourth grade. The 200-seat auditorium is an acoustic marvel, designed so that a child can be heard on stage without any amplification.

The classrooms are as beautifully built and intricately designed as the community hall. The thick straw-bale walls create wide windowsills, which are lined with lush green plants. In addition, the walls have an insulating value more than twice that of conventionally built walls. Buildings stay warm in winter and cool in summer, with very little backup heating or air-conditioning.

The two kindergarten classrooms are built to a child's scale, with lower ceilings, coffered spaces, and no skylights (which are present in all of the older kids' classrooms), providing a safe, womb-like feeling. Classrooms for the younger grades are painted in warm colors, because Steiner believed that very young children still live in a fully open, pictorial consciousness. Once children reach fourth grade, Steiner asserted, they begin to think in abstract terms, and cooler colors are more appropriate.