Co Building With Bamboo

Co-building with Bamboo was published to celebrate 10 years of building with bamboo. It provides an insight into Giant Grass’s evolution from exploring bamboo as a sustainable material to using participatory design and construction approach to empower the community.

"Bamboo Architecture Unboxed" is a comprehensive guide that bridges traditional craftsmanship with contemporary design techniques to revolutionise the bamboo construction landscape. Authored by experts Jorg Stamm and Munir Vahanvati, this book explores the remarkable strength, sustainability, and aesthetic flexibility of bamboo through geometrical principles. Readers are taken on an enlightening journey from the foundational elements of bamboo design to intricate architectural forms inspired by nature. Key geometries such as hyperbolic paraboloids, hyperboloids, tetrahedrons, and geodesic domes are meticulously demystified, offering a blend of historical context, vivid imagery, practical wisdom, and step-by-step construction guides. Whether you're an architect, builder, or enthusiast of sustainable materials, "Bamboo Architecture Unboxed" unfolds as a transformative narrative, inviting you to push creative boundaries and shape a future where eco-conscious constructions and organic silhouettes form the core of our built environment.

This revised handbook brings together the practical experiences of engineers in the field and of research programs testing bamboo. The author shows how bamboo can be harvested, seasoned and jointed to form walls, doors and windows, roofs, floors, ceilings, roof trusses and bridges, and how to weave bamboo.

This book describes the distribution of bamboo forest and bamboo species for construction, the types and characteristics of both engineered and natural full-culm bamboo materials for construction, the development history and research status of different forms of bamboo architecture. We go on to describe standards, relevant international organizations, research institutions and production and processing enterprises and typical cases. Starting from six aspects, this book systematically describes modern bamboo building development, analyzes the opportunities and challenges faced by the bamboo construction industry and provides guidance for the development of the bamboo construction industry in China. Particularly in Chapter 6, more than 70 examples constructed mostly since 2014 are selected to provide a detailed overview of the use of bamboo as decorative and structural materials. In order to fully explore the potential of bamboo in engineering applications, the authors introduce the use of bamboo construction for transportation facilities (bridges, highway landscape fences and bus stations), landscape, water pipelines and urban municipal tunnels. The authors hope readers are inspired by these most vivid cases and experience the charm of modern Chinese bamboo architecture.

Traditionally a building material of hot climate zones in Asia and Latin America, bamboo is increasingly discovered by architects of the Northern hemisphere as well. It is lightweight, highly elastic and ductile, and in addition offers qualities especially in demand in an era of limited resources, renewability and abundant availability. Architects and engineers have significantly widened the applications of bamboo in recent years and today even wide-span bridges can be built from it. Impressed with its technical and aesthetic possibilities, European, Japanese and North American architects have adopted bamboo for a variety of construction tasks, ranging from exclusive private residences to experimental pavilions, and from airy canopies to schools or museums. The book provides a detailed manual for bamboo constructions and presents a broad selection of built examples, among them the spectacular bamboo pavilions of the 2010 Shanghai World Exposition, a parking garage in Leipzig, Germany, the Nomadic Museum in Mexico City and Richard Rogers’ Terminal 4 at Madrid Airport.