The easiest, strongest, cheapest, and most durable material for building structures may now come from your garden. We found some great examples of Bamboo Buildings! It’s 100% natural, thrives in diverse climates, grows up to a whopping 39 inches per day and is super-strong; why isn’t bamboo already used more often as a building material? “I think bamboo and laminated bamboo will replace other materials and become the ‘green steel’ of the 21st century,” said the architects Vo Trong Nghia. “I hope many architects realise the potential of the material and build with bamboo more and more.” Bamboo, which is an extremely fast-growing species of giant grass, grows abundantly, quickly and cheaply in Vietnam, where canes cost as little as a dollar each.
Pulse Pavilion in Macau
It is an inhabitable sculpture, a parametrically generated organic lattice structure created from split bamboo rods, interwoven with fabric panels, and featuring an interactive LED lighting system. In addition to a range of spectacular pre-programmed light shows, the bamboo lattice is lined with motion sensors that cause the LED lights to change in color and intensity as people move around and through the pavilion.
El Guadual Children Center / Daniel Joseph Feldman Mowerman + Iván Dario Quiñones Sanchez
The programmatic make-up of the Center is no more conventional than the design process that was utilized to construct it. The collection of buildings – more accurately labeled an “Early Youth Development Center” – provides education, recreation and catering services to 300 children between the ages of 0 and 5, as well as 100 pregnant mothers and 200 newborns, as part of the national integral early youth attention strategy “de Cero a Siempre”. Design charades with local kids, teenagers, early youth workers, and leaders were the starting point of the design in terms of spaces, materials, dimensions, and relations with the city. The project is an example of low tech environmental construction. It is responsible with the environment inn terms of the materials it use, the water and energy it consumes, and the durability of the materials. The spaces all receive natural light throughout the days and are ventilated naturally allowing the center to work without the need of energy.
Vo Trong Nghia’s Son La Restaurant hides a “bamboo forest” behind stone pavilions
The Son La Restaurant, which won the hotel and leisure category at the World Architecture Festival earlier this month, was designed by Vietnamese firm Vo Trong Nghia Architects for a new hotel resort in the country’s picturesque Son La Province.
Nghia has completed several projects using bamboo, mostly in his native Vietnam. They range from bars, cafes and restaurants where bamboo is used structurally to form arches and domes, to a proposal to solve Vietnam’s housing crisis with cheap, steel-framed homes clad in bamboo.
Soaring domes built with bamboo, the new “green steel”
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam-based firm Vo Trong Nghia Architects is one of these bamboo architecture pioneers, recently constructing a number of gorgeous projects that demonstrate the extensive capabilities of bamboo, which some have dubbed “vegetable steel.”
The Bamboo Hanging Bridge
A bridge made of bamboo. Though steel cables have been added for additional security.
Singapore Hopes to Commercialize Bamboo in Sustainable Construction
As Singapore goes through a construction boom, it is paying more attention to greening the construction process – from studying the use of bamboo to reinforce concrete, to calculating the carbon footprint of buildings. Recently, the Building and Construction Authority (BCA) made “green and gracious builder” certification a requirement for public construction projects from 2017.
