Face the music

Strawdance, as it is called, sits in a Green Belt smallholding that includes a house and various other sheds and outbuildings - a place of dogs and goats and home-grown vegetables and an agreeably pervasive hippy atmosphere. In just such a place, you think, you might run into grizzled survivors of Principal Edwards Magic Theatre, that noted 1960s rock/performance art combo. Or a few members of a cult folk-rock group such as the Albion Band, perhaps indulging in a spot of light hoeing. But this is the last year of the century, and the little building you are led along a winding woodland path to discover is - despite its straw construction - anything but folksy. It may not be Big Bad Wolf, but it's by no means Three Little Piggies either.

Its architect is Yasmin Shariff of Dennis Sharp Architects. Shariff is no eco-warrior - her more usual work is in the English modern tradition, and she drives a car with brio - but she has a growing interest in sustainability. Having known the family involved in Strawdance - Fabrizia and Tessa Verrecchia - for a long time, she understood the ethos of the place and the demands of the art form. There was practically no money to spare: so she set her mind to making a Lottery application on their behalf.

You could build thousands of these little buildings with the money that disappears down the cracks of the Lottery-funding process, sometimes millions of pounds at a time. It was the result of a clever bid to the Arts Council's painfully named and now-defunct "Arts4Everyone Express" scheme, which was a short-lived response to criticisms of gargantuan Lottery projects like the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, and was aimed at practising penniless artists. The scheme did not have buildings in mind at all. How could it? The amounts it gave out were surely too small to build anything.

Therefore Strawdance is, officially, not so much a building as a "collaborative installation" by three artists, two of whom happen to be dancers, and one an architect, who for the purposes of this project doubled as an "environmental installation artist". Well, the building of Strawdance did turn out to be a bit of an event: volunteers came in to pour the concrete foundation, bend the bales into a slight curve to fit the radius of the building, and stack them up. This labour counted as the top-up funding that the Lottery grant required, while subsequent workshop sessions on the construction of the place gave it the necessary public-benefit twist.