The goal of the designer for this building  was to design and build a building using a variety of salvaged, recycled and by-product materials. In doing so, salvaged open-web steel trusses, Faswall wall-form blocks (wood and concrete blocks), recycled bottles, straw bale walls(R-40), wheat board, salvaged doors, salvaged hinges, salvaged windows, salvaged wood for posts and beams, broken concrete of the floor were all reused to construct this building.  

    The buildings structure on the north side is consisted of Faswall blocks which are made from 90 percent wood waste and 10 percent cement and are shaped into interlocking wall-form blocks. The rest of the structure is a post and beam system using salvaged wood. Straw bales were stacked in between the post and beam structure to form the walls. The building was then finished off with stucco over the straw bales and aluminum litho plates on the clearstory section of the building. The roofs structure is consisted of salvaged open-web steel trusses and overlaid with wood cross members and reused corrugated translucent fiberglass sheets.

    Although this building was designed as a plant nursery, today it is used as a chicken coop and houses a variety of different types of birds being raised and sold by Stookey's Feed and Garden Center.

    the plan - Our teams plan for this building is to go and visit the chicken coop and try and come up with a hypothesis on why the building performs the way it does, good or bad. This could be thermally, passively, or how well natural light works within the space. After visiting the building the first time, the team was interested in the construction materials of the building since they are a bit unconventional in the Palouse  region. Our main concern became the materials used for the roof system. As said before, the roof is consisted of reused corrugated translucent fiberglass sheets. These of course are not insulated and therefore causes a lot of heat lose from the building. It seemed like a lot of trouble was put into providing thermal mass and high R-values in the wall of the structure, but the roof counteracts with these features. This leads to our hypothesis. 

    tools of the trade - The method of this research will be via "HOBO." The Hobo is a temperature measuring tool that records temperatures at set times for a giving amount of days. Then when the time period is up for recording the wanted information, it is downloaded into a program called "Box Car", which puts the information in to an easily read graph format. This information is then used to interpret the temperature at the points of placement within the building and one outside the building to record outside temperature. As a  resourceful tool, the hobos' used with this case study proved there worth.