Elora Hardy of Ibuku thinks your next house might be made of bamboo, according to Treehugger’s Derek Markham:
Bamboo has the compressive strength of concrete, the same strength-to-weight ratio of steel, and can regenerate itself in just a few short years. It’s also flexible, beautiful, and resilient, and serves as an effective carbon sequestration channel.
Sounds great, right? So why aren’t more buildings made from this wonder material? Because bamboo is a wild grass, it’s also round, hollow, and tapered, and presents unique challenges to those who build with it. The material lends itself more easily to bespoke homes than to conventional and mass-produced houses, which have a ready source of straight, square, and uniform wood, thanks to the well-established timber industry.
And there might be the rub – as Elora makes clear in her TED talk, houses from bamboo are not suitable for mass construction. Each one requires a lot of work, a lot of careful selection of the proper bamboo shoot, which means this may be an expensive option .. piling up on already expensive land.
However, they have solved the problem of insects eating your house, according to Quartz:
Bamboo architecture has actually been extant since the 16th century in tropical areas of the world, and is an emerging architectural and interior design specialty in Asia. But until recent breakthroughs in insecticide treatment, bamboo buildings were considered temporary structures, because bugs and termites would eventually destroy them. “Untreated bamboo gets eaten to dust,” explained Hardy. Ibuku’s bamboo is treated with boron, in a low-toxicity solution that renders the bamboo indigestible to insects.
Boron appears to have low toxicity.
And the links include some gorgeous pictures.
