IAAC / Digital Technologies in Architecture / 2007: Bamboo

“While bamboo is a very traditional Japanese building material, it can also be considered a digital material that is composed of many independent, separable, and flexible elements. Unlike concrete, which is all fused together in one inseparable and inflexible lump, bamboo has a quality of imper-manence.”

Kengo Kuma

The choice of the Bamboo both as structural element and not structural it had the purpose to rediscover the linear essence of the Asian architecture.
The theme of the wall suggested by the nearby monument and the use of bamboo as a primary construction material informed the design stage. The Great Wall has always symbolized China’s desire to avoid contact with other cultures, the attempt to preserve a vast national heritage by closing off its territory. The fragility of the bamboo canes that are used to build Kengo Kuma’s house are in contrast to the solidity of the Wall’s stone and bricks. An immediate contrast is created with the hermetic essence of the world’s largest monument. Absolute separation is replaced by a wall that lets wind and light filter in. The density of the canes defines the different filtering thresholds of natural phenomena. The wall remains a boundary, a place of contact between two different systems and a place of exchange.
The bamboo becomes therefore the skin of the manufactured article and it covers the carrying structure of it type traditional.
This skin, strongly characterized by a vertical texture, it dresses again attics and pillars.
The bamboo auctions are bound to form constructive elements that, in correspondence of the openings, they become flowing elements brise-soleil.
The basic form of the bamboo plant consists of a branch system of segmented axes. The canes of bamboo consists of nodes, segments and diaphragms. The average length of the canes is amount 8-15 with a diameter of 5-12 cm and a wall thickness of 10 mm.
The nodes, as a form of reinforcemed, increase the resistance of the cane against splitting and buckling.
After about the first three years of growth the canes start to lignifying and silicate slowly. It is only then that they become useful as structural timber. Before that period, between 6-12 months, they are extremely flexible, and can be used in order to generate curve shapes, morphologically complex.
The bamboo is a material that modifies its mechanical ownerships according to the age, of the date of harvest, of the degree of damp, of the climate and of the ground.
The reeds are naturally composed by linear forms connected through of the joints.
In proximity of these joints it is found a hard membrane that serves for stiffening.
The material, of local origin, has been worked in Japan because of the technical incapability, in China, to dig the inside of the reeds.
The employed system is an ancient Japanese method everything in use now and consists in an express flame heating of the side surface of the reed (270°) up to provoke the issue of one it resins that naturally polymerizes, forming a auto protect film.
Then, the bamboo has covered with an oil, as suggested by the Chinese local carpenters.
After the removal of the inside marrow he is passed to the realization of a structural pillar inserting to the inside of the reed an auction in steel for the whole length of the stem.
Then proceeds to the throw of cement.
In practice the bamboo reed has been used as form to lose.
One of the most ecological materials to disposition of all the architects, not only for the rapid growth, that guarantees boundless reserves, but also, above all, for the unbelievable abilities to oppose the atmospheric pollution: a bamboo plantation is in fact able you capture up to 17 t of carbon, for hectare, to the year , ones it ciphers 40 times superior in comparison to a normal wood.