During 2006 & 2007, Max and Alex Edleson set about the building of Alex’s house in a clearing in the woods on a community-owned piece of land in the beautiful Rio Azul valley, near El Bolson, Argentina (Patagonia). The building is a hybrid of natural building techniques including round-pole timber framing, rustic carpentry, non-load bearing strawbale, wattle and daub and living roofs. We harvested about half the wood for the building from the woods around the house and a had a local woodsman bring in the other half by truck, some of it milled. Our good friend Simon Van den Heede grew the oats that the straw for the straw bales came from and one fine fall day, with the first sprinklings of the season, we swept the recently harvested bales off of the field and stored them under the newly constructed roof. We still have yet to make and place the shingles on the front roof so the corrugated asphalt roof is temporary.
Consider the whole structure an homage to the sun, completely oriented to that infinitely generous source of heat and light….
