An airport made of bamboo? A tower reaching 20 metres high? For many years, bamboo has been mostly known as the favourite food of giant pandas, but a group of engineers say it’s time we took it seriously as a building material, too.
This week the Institution of Structural Engineers called for architects to be “bamboo-ready” as they published a manual for designing permanent buildings made of the material, in an effort to encourage low-carbon construction and position bamboo as a proper 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 Bengaluru, India, bamboo tubes make up the ceiling and pillars. The Ninghai bamboo tower in north-east China, which is more than 20 metres tall, is claimed to be the world’s first high-rise building made using engineered bamboo.
The Arc at the Green School in Bali, Indonesia. Photograph: Institute of Structural Engineers
At the Green School in Bali, a bamboo-made arc serves as the gymnasium and a striking example of how the material is reshaping sustainable architecture.
The use of composite bamboo shear walls have proved to be resilient against earthquakes and extreme weather in countries such as Colombia and the Philippines, where sustainable, disaster-resilient housing has been built with locally sourced materials.
The construction industry accounted for one-third of global carbon emissions in 2022, with more than half of that being a result of the use of cement and cementitious materials. As urbanisation continues, bringing with it greater pressures for housing and other infrastructure, the challenge facing the sector is how to meet demand while staying on track to meet net zero targets.
An example of bamboo features in the interior of a house. Photograph: Cass
Bamboo has a fast growth rate – of about three to six years, compared with timber which is measured in decades – and its larger varieties are particularly suitable for building use.
Neil Thomas, the director of Atelier One, a UK-based structural engineering company that worked on the Green School project, said: “Everything you can do with timber, you can do with bamboo.”
In its natural shape, the bio-based material has a long historical pedigree of being used in construction. However, the manual points to “knowledge gaps” that have prevented full use of its potential – partly due to colonisation and its influences on technical education.
Torogan House, made with bamboo features, in Bukidnon, the Philippines. Photograph: Base Bahay Foundation Inc
David Trujillo, the lead author of the manual and an assistant professor in humanitarian engineering at the University of Warwick, said he hoped it would “empower engineers to use their local resources” such as bamboo.
Bamboo is already readily available in tropical and subtropical climates, and changes in the Mediterranean climate have led to larger varieties of bamboo being grown as a crop in Portugal too, potentially opening the way for the material to be used for building purposes more widely in Europe.
Thomas believes bamboo can serve as an “inspiration to architects and engineers looking for low-carbon materials”. It is not appropriate for buildings exceeding two storeys, but Trujillo said bamboo-constructed buildings acted as a carbon store and that the harvesting of the crop could help with the recovery of soil that had been degraded by monocultures. Growing bamboo also requires little in the way of pesticides or fertilisers.
The bamboo roof of a club house in Colombia. Photograph: David Trujillo/University of Warwick
Trujillo added: “The idea that we can move people away from using carbon-intensive materials and towards low-carbon materials or, better still, carbon-fixing materials seems like a very wise way of minimising the emissions from urbanisation.”
He hopes the manual will help in persuading “lecturers around the world to incorporate it in their taught content so that we educate our next generation of engineers and architects to be bamboo-ready”.
