proyectos

The Bale House Visitor Centre

England

Visitor centre for Hastings Country Park Nature Reserve, on the Hastings cliffs (East Sussex, United Kingdom), commissioned by Hastings Borough Council from the Cave Co-operative studio and built by straw specialists led by Huff and Puff Construction and Green & Castle. Officially opened in June 2022, it is Hastings' first public straw building. Its walls are made of load-bearing straw bales, supplied by an Essex farm specialising in dense bales for construction, rendered with lime inside and out and finished with breathable lime paints; the structure uses British-grown Douglas fir and larch, the floor slab is limecrete over an insulating subbase of recycled glass aggregate, and the plinth was built with one hundred per cent recycled concrete. Thanks to the high insulation of the straw, the building requires barely any energy to run and needs no additional heating: cool in summer and warm in winter. It houses a café and interpretation of the nature reserve and was shortlisted at the MacEwen Awards 2022.