It’s cheap, grows at super speeds (sometimes shooting skyward at up to 1.5 metres a day), and is one of the world’s most environmentally friendly building materials.
Now a wave of modern architects is using bamboo – traditionally associated with dirt-cheap housing – to conjure up high-end homes that defy the imagination.
Sure, you may not see these architectural masterpieces popping up anywhere in Australia, but it never hurts to do a little tropical dreaming.
Looking for the ultimate jungle fantasy escape? This six-level, four bedroom bamboo home overlooking Bali’s Ayung River valley might stop you in your tracks.
Set on a nine-metre-high cliff, Sharma Springs is part of Green Village, a small community of private homes inspired by the eco-friendly Green School nearby.
Like all the buildings at Green Village, Sharma Springs is as unique as the bamboo it’s built from.
The home is entered via a gobsmacking tunnel-bridge bringing visitors to the open-air living, dining and kitchen spaces on the fourth level.
With the sounds of the jungle and river nearby, “it’s really like living up in the treetops”, says Elora Hardy, creative director of Ibuku.
Raised in Bali, Ms Hardy heads a team of designers and builders who work with local craftspeople to create mind-bending bamboo homes and other structures across the island.
She says traditionally, poor families were forced to use bamboo purely because of its affordability. But because it wasn’t treated properly, it was vulnerable to insects that began eating the material even before building was completed.
“Bamboo is a grass so it’s cellulose, which is sweet. The sweetness of the sap is what attracts the bugs,” says Ms Hardy.
However, during the past decade, builders have begun treating the bamboo with a salt solution that banishes the sweetness and renders the bamboo inedible for insects.
Ms Hardy says that’s enabled luxury homes such as those at Green Village – some cost well over $US1 million ($1.3 million) – to be created, with a life span similar to that of any well-cared-for wooden home.
“It’s been really encouraging that people have made the leap – that bamboo is no longer stuck in the super humble category, or frankly stuck in the poverty category, in Asia. The international perception has shifted,” says Ms Hardy.
However, no two bamboo poles are the same, so the material poses particular challenges.
“Bamboo has really beautiful, unique features that are really compelling and it also has extra challenges because it’s an irregular material,” she says.
Photo: Rio Helmi
“For us, we’re really grappling with it from the beginning, because every pole is unique. Every pole tapers and curves so it’s really a challenge to get your head around that.”
Bamboo is a highly sustainable material, growing in small clumps that regenerate.
“To grow a tree takes decades – even sustainable timber takes many years. But when you’re building with bamboo you’re building with poles that grew within three to five years,” says Ms Hardy.
Many other architects around the world are also using bamboo in innovative ways.
In 2008, Norwegian architects
TYIN Tegnestue travelled to a small village on the Thai-Burmese border, Noh Bo, to design and build houses for Karen refugee children. The long conflict in Burma had forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and left many children orphaned.
Soe Ker Tie House provides children their own private space. Photo: Pasi Aalto/pasiaalto.com
The architects set out to provide housing for 24 orphans, and in conjunction with local workers, created six spectacular dormitory buildings, which came to be known as Soe Ker Tie House – or The Butterfly Houses.
The idea was to give the children their own private space where they could feel at home, and a space to play with their friends.
All the bamboo used in the design was harvested within a few kilometres of the site.
A Forest for a Moon Dazzler.
In Costa Rica, architect Benjamin Garcia Saxe built the bamboo beauty pictured above, “A Forest for a Moon Dazzler” for his mother Helen.
Mr Saxe says his mother moved from the city to jungle in search of a place she felt at home.
A Forest for a Moon Dazzler.
She began building her home with scraps of wood and plastic bags, with her bed placed in a corner where she could view the moon while going to sleep.
“She has asked me to complete her dream of living safely in the woods, but I know she believes that this is a way for us to be always together,” says Mr Saxe.