If this design serves as a seemingly elegant answer to the question of thatch in Ontario, then the construction of a prototype model muddies and deepens the question by introducing cascading challenges inherent to the extraction and processing of these materials. The straw was harvested at Blackrapids Farms, a 400-acre single-family dairy farm leased on National Capital Commission land, where farmers Peter and Rosemary Ruiter grow corn, soybeans and wheat as feedstock for their cattle. Though they had already harvested their wheat upon my arrival in early September, I was given permission to reap the straw remaining on the margins of their field where the combine didn’t reach. I endeavoured to accomplish this with a scythe which, for a first-time wielder such as myself, was as predictably stilted and frustrating as it was poetic. Part of the difficulty in scything was in keeping the stalks from folding as they fell, given that bent stalks became significantly more finicky to comb. The water reed and prairie grass sites were located using an open source species mapping app, iNaturalist, and harvested using gardening shears. With respect to the native grasses, I took care not to harvest too many stalks from a single bushel, for fear of over-thinning the local population. I clipped the ears and threshed the leaves and was continuously astonished by how their apparent volume reduced dramatically when they were laid in parallel. I filled carload after carload with foraged vegetation and when my car broke down I biked through the snow and filled my backpack. I never seemed to have enough material. I bathed the fibres to make them more malleable, I packed them into formwork and painted on clay slip, layer by layer. I painstakingly tightened straps and sank when the bolts slipped through my fingers and embedded themselves in the thatch. Many of the cladding blocks kept strong but some loosened and even collapsed during installation, due to discrepancies in the strap tension which I could not have predicted. The process was slow, frustrating, messy, laborious, exhausting, and at times meditative or even serene. My studio took on the nostalgic perfume of sweet earth and barnyard musk.
all images Olive Lazarus
Block Textures: above: Winter Wheat (Triticum aestivum ) and Switchgrass (Panicum virgatum ). below: European Water Reed (Phragmites Australis ).
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on site review 48 :: building materials
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