Schools, airports, high-rise towers: architects urged to get ‘bamboo-ready’ | Green building
AA bamboo airport? A tower reaching 20 meters high? For many years, bamboo has been best known as the favorite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material as well.
This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called on architects to be “bamboo ready” by publishing a handbook for designing permanent buildings made from the material, in a bid to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a suitable alternative to steel and concrete.
Bamboo has already been used for a number of boundary-pushing projects around the world. At Terminal 2 of Kempegowda International Airport in Bangalore, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai Bamboo Tower in northeast China, which is more than 20 meters high, is believed to be the world’s first high-rise building made from engineered bamboo.
At the Green School in Bali, a bamboo arch serves as a gymnasium and is a striking example of how the material is reshaping sustainable architecture.
The use of bamboo composite shear walls has proven to be resistant to earthquakes and extreme weather conditions in countries like Colombia and the Philippines, where sustainable, disaster-resilient housing has been built with locally sourced materials.
The construction industry was responsible for a third of global carbon emissions in 2022, more than half of which was due to the use of cement and cementitious materials. As urbanization continues, leading to increased pressures on housing and other infrastructure, the challenge facing the sector is how to meet demand while remaining on track to meet net zero emissions targets.
Bamboo has a rapid growth rate – about three to six years, compared to lumber which is measured in decades – and its larger varieties are particularly suited to construction.
Neil Thomas, director of Atelier One, a UK-based structural engineering company which worked on the Green School project, said: “Anything you can do with wood, you can do with bamboo. »
In its natural form, this material of biological origin has long been used in construction. However, the handbook highlights “knowledge gaps” that have prevented the full utilization of its potential – partly due to colonization and its influences on technical education.
David Trujillo, the manual’s lead author and assistant professor of humanitarian engineering at the University of Warwick, said he hoped it would “allow engineers to use their local resources” like bamboo.
Bamboo is already readily available in tropical and subtropical climates, and changes in the Mediterranean climate have led to the cultivation of larger varieties of bamboo in Portugal as well, potentially paving the way for wider use of this material for construction purposes in Europe.
Thomas believes bamboo can serve as “inspiration for architects and engineers looking for low-carbon materials.” This is not appropriate for buildings taller than two stories, but Trujillo said buildings constructed of bamboo serve as carbon storage and harvesting the crop could help reclaim soil degraded by monocultures. Bamboo cultivation also requires few pesticides or fertilizers.
Trujillo added: “The idea that we can move people away from using carbon-intensive materials and toward low-carbon materials or, better yet, carbon-fixing materials seems to be a very sensible way to minimize emissions from urbanization. »
He hopes the manual will help persuade “lecturers around the world to incorporate it into their teaching content so that we can train our next generation of engineers and architects to be bamboo-ready.”
