although the bamboo been used in construction in Asia for thousands of years, it is starting to catch on in sustainable housing development in parts of the United States and elsewhere in the world.
The co-founder and chief architect of Bamboo Living, David Sands is at the forefront of modern and sustainable bamboo construction.
His Hawaii-based company specializes in creating bamboo houses and other buildings, with clients such as the rock star Sammy Hagar the actress Barbara Hershey the music tycoon Shep Gordon the founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar .
The following conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Why bamboo? What makes it an ideal material for construction and the environment?
Giant bamboos are the fastest growing woody plant on the planet. If you go to the Guinness Book of World Records, they grow two and three feet a day that they do. So you end up with those 30 meter tall plants in just a few months. In the third year, you have amazing building material, and that’s when we harvest for our homes.
As the fastest growing plant there is, it is probably the fastest natural way to get CO2 (carbon dioxide) out of our atmosphere. Through photosynthesis, it takes that CO2 and turns it into sugars and then into real fiber, the storage mechanism for atmospheric carbon. And that’s important in terms of getting CO2 out of the atmosphere quickly.
Usually when you harvest a tree, you kill the tree, and it has to start all over again. And with bamboo, every year it’s sending out new logs, so you just harvest a percentage of those logs and it just keeps growing. Plants can live up to 120 years. You know how you keep mowing the grass and the grass keeps coming up? It’s really like that – it’s a grass. It is the largest of the grasses.
From an architect’s point of view, can you talk about the strength and flexibility of bamboo?
It’s an incredibly strong material. By weight, it’s actually a stronger base than steel, which is much, much heavier than bamboo. Bamboo has more than twice the strength of wood normally used for construction, and has a compressive strength similar to concrete.
Our buildings have experienced several Category 5 hurricanes, with winds of up to 200 miles per hour. We’ve had our buildings go through up to 6.9 on the Richter scale in terms of seismic events or earthquakes. Since bamboo is much lighter and stronger based on weight, it can flex and then bounce back.
Where did you build bamboo houses? And is there potential to go elsewhere?
We have homes in the Caribbean, the South Pacific, Southeast Asia and Southern California now. I was in Florida working on a project. I’m going to India to meet a group that wants to build our houses there.
There is definitely an opportunity to indulge in just about any weather. I think stylistically the houses we’ve made so far have had that kind of tropical feel to them. But there was a client yesterday who wanted to do a project (on) Long Island, which would be really fun.
Have you seen an increase in interest in bamboo houses?
Yes there is. We’ve never been so busy and we’re expanding production now. I think the concern about the climate crisis has really caught people’s attention, and really being able to make personal choices that directly impact that is a big issue.
It’s certainly what got me started. I built myself a house on Maui 30 years ago and was trying to be as sustainable as possible. But then they delivered the wood to build the house, and it was really a punch in the gut of, like, this is an entire forest! And this is happening every time, for every home in the United States. And I just felt like I had to do something different.
You live in a bamboo house now. How it is?
I love. There’s a connection to nature in terms of just knowing that the house itself is helping to solve the climate crisis. But then, the beauty of it, the shapes that we can make with bamboo that you wouldn’t necessarily be able to make with dimensional material; it’s really like living in a mobile. All the handcrafted joinery, beautiful beams and radiant beams, they add a level of beauty to the building that is truly something special.
Source: CNN Brasil
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