I’m familiar with the Bamboo Living company. If I recall correctly, they were employing some of the technology that was being developed by the Bamboo Village project;
http://www.bamboovillagehawaii.org/intro.htm
Bamboo is legendary for its strength but has long been a difficult material to work with because of its dimensional variability, its brittleness along the grain, and its high susceptibility to weathering. It can’t be nailed, joined by mortice and tendon, or glued along external surfaces. Traditional building methods have relied on lashed joints relying on bamboo fiber. (the Japanese and Polynesians traditionally used bamboo AS nails) This remains it’s most adaptive approach but, despite the obvious strength of correctly fashioned bamboo lashing (it’s about as strong as steel cable), this method is considered unreliable for large structures. This has favored the modern use of bamboo in very highly processed forms such as laminates, common for bamboo flooring. Bamboo Tech has adopted a phosphate infusion technique for structural bamboo preservation and a system of internally reinforced bolted joints. It’s effective, but the processing is relatively labor intensive and they still require a polyurethane surface sealant used both indoors and out. This coupled to the fact that they still import all their structural grade bamboo from Vietnam prevents them from realizing a real economic advantage and their stated goal of establishing a native Hawaiian building materials industry. They’ve also made no attempt to realize a truly modular building system. Their kits are, of course, modular in the context of a specific home design but not modular in terms of being a generic building system for a large diversity of structures. And they aren’t really designed for or intended to be demountable. Still, I think they’ve done amazingly well at helping get bamboo architecture toward mainstream use. No question that they’ve advanced the state of the art in this.
Another innovator in bamboo use is a German company called Bambutec.
Its founder devised a clever system for bamboo joinery based on the use of milled laminate lumber joints bonded with a high performance casein-based adhesive pressure-injected into ends of structural bamboo members. The system also works with wood struts. This allows for the construction of extremely strong large span trusses, space frames, and geodesic domes with uniform modular components in structures that are literally glued together without any metal elements. The only limitation is that the joints are quite permanent and repairs or adaptations tricky. There’s no demountability. However, it has employed the strategy of larger component modules mechanically joined at their wood block joints, which can then be dismantled at that large component level. Still, it’s an interesting technology.
Ultimately, the use of bamboo in the form of engineered laminate lumber may be the most practical way to use it for adaptive structures of scale, though there really is nothing wrong with lashed structures at small scales beyond the minor complication of integrating other materials to it by tied attachment. As a milled laminate, it can be employed just like lumber in alloy joint systems or simple bolt joint systems like that of Box Beam and have dimensional uniformity of parts. However, there has been little development outside of research labs of laminate bamboo lumber in thicknesses beyond that of flooring planks. Bamboo textiles is another new material that has surfaced recently and its potential in architectural applications remains unexplored. Woven reed and bamboo was a common material for wall systems in traditional light pavilion architecture and bamboo lattice common in the Asian equivalents of wattle & daub clay composite wall systems. We can expect these new textiles to see use in carpeting and wall coverings early on, but their potential as the basis of a variety of composite materials is great, especially in combination with newer plant-derived non-toxic non-petroleum resins and polyurethane foams. I’ve suggested their potential for interior finishing even in space habitats, where the cultivation of fast growing plants like bamboo as a source of industrial materials is very practical when a settlement still has a nascent industrial infrastructure and limited energy sources. There may be remarkable similarities in character between Asian design and the artifact design in space settlements because of the tendency for modularity and the very similar mix of likely indigenously produced materials with low energy processing; bamboo, paper, reed products, textiles (silk worms are a lot more efficient to cultivate in limited spaces than sheep or cotton), clays and ceramics, carved or cast stone, laminates, etc.
I know there is a UN program for global development of bamboo industry and its use in relief architecture. Frank Toma, of Tomahouses, was supposedly exploring its use for relief housing in combination with T-slot structures for a friend who worked in this program, though there it was only being used in the form of laminates and woven screens for modular paneling, flooring, and ceiling systems. Another strong analog to space applications.
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