Back when I was a home energy auditor for Efficiency Kansas, we were given a crash course in "building science" that made a lot of assumptions about how buildings are built and what they're made of. While those assumptions were safe for the houses I was auditing, I couldn't help wondering about the naturally built structures my friends had made from strawbales and cob and such. This article by John Straube does a great job of bridging the gap between natural building and building science. It explains how a strawbale wall works in terms of the functions performed by each component, and it lays out what can go wrong and what can be done to prevent problems.