| Related Pages: |
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GREEN BUILDING - Learn about
Paja Construction's building philosophy STRAW BALE CONSTRUCTION - Learn about the advantages and challenges associated with straw bale building |
About Paja Construction
How does one decide what to do for a profession? Overall, I’ve no idea. But I do know that from an early age, building something - anything, really - always fascinated me. I think the combination of two concepts particularly sparked my interest:
- The ability to magically create a vertical thing called a building from a simple stack of lumber lying horizontally on the ground.
- How that magical vertical building is created by the combined strength of arms and legs and the coordination of mind and body, pitted against the unyielding weight of that horizontal stack of lumber.
| It was the difficulty in transforming the horizontal to the vertical which I loved and that drew me to join one framing crew after another. Unknown to me at the time, the larger challenge and magic of construction became the birth of Paja Construction. |
A decade and dozens upon dozens of conventionally-built houses later, it dawned on me that there is much more to a home than quickly-built walls and trusses. I had spent parts of that decade in Central America, building at refugee camps and in earthquake and hurricane devastated areas. The use of locally-available building materials in these locations impressed me: we were using earth and corn stalks for walls, car tires for roofing, and river gravel for foundations. Similarly - well before the days of widespread environmental concern and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth - it was becoming obvious that we builders needed to adjust our thinking and attitudes toward construction.
It was in the switch from my formerly-nomadic lifestyle, where I went from crashing in apartment complexes to living in a century-old adobe house, that I fully realized the huge difference of living in a home that was holistically constructed as opposed to having been slapped together. To my shame, I recognized I’d been doing just this for the last decade. I resolved to do better.
In 1991, a friend introduced me to straw bale construction. I traveled with him to Southern New Mexico to take a weekend workshop ... and was hooked. Here was an environmentally-friendly, cheap, locally-produced product which could super-insulate houses and which I could carve like butter! Alan Greenspan would have accused me of irrational exuberance in those next few years: I built myself a straw house and began living in it; invented a system of constructing privacy walls; gave scores of workshops; purchased another falling-apart house, retrofitted it with bales and then lived there for a while.
I then transitioned from a phase of exuberance into a sober reassessment of the challenges versus the advantages of straw bale construction. Here began the development of the phase in which Paja Construction stands.
| Integrating straw bales as part of an overall method of building that incorporates design and landscaping, water conservation and solar heating, alternative foundations and alternative trusses … AND straw bales. |
So how does one decide what to do for a profession? My favorite theologian, Sam Keene, says it in a flowery way:
There is no greater joy, he says, than finding that point where the needs of the world converge with ones personal gifts.
Through the work I do, I’ve been privileged to find that particular point in my life. For the last six years I have also been fortunate enough to be joined by a master carpenter, excellent organizer, and wonderful teacher: my foreman Pete Mayne. Together, we’ve formed a construction company which is both a pleasure to work on and one that we take pride in producing the best green houses in … well … in our neck of the woods!
