Neil Thomas of Atelier One has produced a learning module for School of Specification to share the lessons learnt from more than a decade spent researching and building with bamboo. Here, he explains why it’s a material the construction industry can’t afford to ignore.
Do you think the UK construction industry is ready for bamboo?
It has to be. We have to fundamentally change the way we build, and bamboo is one of the most sustainable building materials we have. 13 years ago, when I first started going to Bali and talking about bamboo, people laughed. They’re not laughing any more. The interest is growing dramatically. But to use bamboo in a western European context, it needs to be thought about differently. We can’t apply existing codes to bamboo. It takes different ways of thinking. For example, fire risk reduction. There are ways to create redundancies, so if one group burns, the other group can’t, limiting the fire spreading. The fundamental point is, don’t change bamboo to work with the codes, change the codes to work with bamboo.
You say it’s one of the most sustainable building materials in the world. Can you back that up?
Bamboo is a grass. So when you harvest it, it’s like mowing the lawn. Unlike a tree, it doesn’t die. It regrows and continues to grow. So a single bamboo clump can produce up to 15 kilometers of usable culm over a 15-year period. Bamboo sequesters around four times more CO2 than an average timber and produces 35 per cent more oxygen in the equivalent lifetime.
How would you respond to the argument that it seems counter-intuitive to specify a material for its carbon credentials then import it from the other side of the world?
We are starting to see commerical bamboo plantations across Europe, particularly Southern Europe. And some areas of the UK – including Greater London – now have the perfect climate for growing bamboo. That said, providing a market for bamboo plantations in the Global South can be hugely valuable in socio-economic terms. The fact that bamboo can be continuously harvested means it has the potential to support a permanent workforce and a community based around growing, harvesting and processing bamboo. So importing bamboo can be a really effective means of supporting rural farmers in developing countries.
What are the structural properties of bamboo?
People describe bamboo as being like concrete or steel, but that’s not quite right. From my experience of working with bamboo I’d say it’s more like carbon fibre. Bamboo is a tube. The wall of the tube is made up of cellular bundles, but from the inside to the outside of the wall the cells get denser and denser, meaning it’s getting stronger and stronger. The outside is a silica layer.
Inside the tubes, you have nodes with a diaphragm that crosses over. If you design a tube, it will be really strong but could buckle. Bamboo has stabilised the tube with the nodes. A straight tube could still buckle along its length, but the slight curvature in bamboo means that each individual point is stabilised by the opposite curvature. It’s incredible. If I were to design the perfect construction material it would look a lot like bamboo.
What structures lend themselves to bamboo?
Bamboo in its natural form is an amazing material, but, with a few exceptions, is not directly applicable to the construction industry in the developed world. Given that the construction industry is responsible for around 35 per cent of greenhouses gases we produce, this has to be addressed. Thankfully bamboo in its engineered form has the properties – and crucially the uniformity – to make it a valuable part of the designer’s palette, and a crucial tool in the battle against climate change.
Source: Architecture Today