Natural Building Alliance

Ian has been on the NBA (COSBA) Board since 2005 and was named Interim Director in 2016, and then Director in 2018. He grew up landscaping and harvesting hay with the family business back east, then came to CU Boulder for an engineering degree. After graduating in 2002, he served as a team member on one of the very first Engineers Without Borders p... rojects in Haiti, and found a job in the natural building world that he quickly fell in love with. Ian has been a licensed engineer since 2008 and a husband since 2011, when he and his wife spent part of their honeymoon studying earthen arches in Auroville, India. Ian, his wife and their daughter have recently built a strawbale house in Boulder, CO. Mark was raised in the Midwest, schooled in Ohio at the University of Dayton and paid for his schooling pouring concrete in the summers. He stuck with the concrete after moving to Colorado in 73 and began a successful flatwork business in Boulder in 82, selling the business in 04. Natural building became a focus in 99 and after his retirement became Executive Director of the Colorado Straw Bale Association 2003-2006. With COSBA Mark had an opportunity to work with Engineers Without Borders, train/teach Natural Building practices to students at the University of Colorado and trained indigenous people on several reservations throughout the western US and Mexico. Mark is now an avid gardener and can often be seen fly-fishing the many streams in Colorado. He is retired now and living in the straw bale and earthen plaster home he built north of Boulder. Natural building and renewable energy have been at the forefront of Jeffs career for more than 23 years (as of 2019). Jeff has been in the construction trades his entire adult life and even as far back to his high school days when he worked on his fathers construction sites. Jeff was one of the founders of StrawCrafters, a design-build construction company in Boulder, Colorado that made a huge regional impact on bale construction in the late 90s. Jeff has been a licensed ...Read More