Straw Bale Yurt

[bss]

It would not be necessary for the bale walls to support the tension of the roof, only the vertical load. A commercially produced yurt roof structure is very light compared to what we normally think of as a "roof" (talking square houses), and straw bale walls are ridiculously strong. You would just use a large diameter (you would have to do some calculating to arrive at the exact size cable) capable of supporting the entire weight of the roof on its own? The concerns here would be finding the tools and hardware to terminate the cable ends properly (extremely important. catastrophic roof implosion = bad.) and also to keep it from blowing away. I would recommend cable here too, anchored vertically right down through your stacked bales into concrete anchors which you poured before setting the bales. Bolt it from the bottom and thread the cable up. Mark the spot, drill the bale, thread the cable, stack the bale. All the way up and out the top and aroundthe

tension cable

. Something like that.

I don't think you would find too much trouble finding a yurt roof, but I would probably source these parts first if you're going to base half of the design off of it. You could build the ring and rafters easily, there are formulas for all the measurements.

On second thought you would probably end up having to build the rafters anyways, because they won't set the same and modifying someone else's pre-built ones at all will only make them shorter. Then the roof cover won't fit right.