Its been months since we have updated you. Not that we have abandoned our pursuit to spread the glory of mud and bamboo, its just that we have too busy expanding our resources. In our latest repertoire of natural materials we have added 17th century wood construction tecnique from Germany! Our Abarian Sulava Piya recently got back from Germany after a three month long restoration of a 17th century museum in Schliersee, Germay led by legendary skier/restorer Markus Wasmeir and his carpenters team. She was funded by Dekeyser and Friends Foundation.

The restoration primarily used the techniques and tools from the 17th century like wooden nails, dove tail joints, hanging floors, moss mortar, wooden shingels held with stones. Here are some of the pictures of the restoration. Please note the foundation techniques, where they used huge boulders that were just placed on the ground.

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After long and arduous battle our kitchen is finished. The tiles looks awesome. They are made on site! They have no embodied energy what so ever- meaning they are not burnt.

During this construction, we have followed a very conventional philosophy i.e. a sound hat and a sound boot is all what you need for protection. Bamboo is delicate, its vulnerable but if used properly can be hardy and durable. 

May this be the year of bamboo and mud. Our cantina is in its final stage. The trusses are complete. The structure is about 120 sq. meters in area. It uses locally harvested, locally treated bamboo which are constructed using local labor. Its a nice execution of our motto “think global, act local” It is built in a remote village called Harsar in the southern plains of Nepal. According to our calculation, the structure costs more than half compared to concrete and steel. Moreover, the structure has become pride of this impoverished but ambitious little village.

The more we work with bamboo, more confident we become on the strength and beauty of this  vegetal steel. It  makes one wonder, why isn’t this material used more in the modern construction, as there is nothing it cant do that steel would. Yet, its cheaper, available, beautiful and yet many times more ecological. Here is one of our offices that is under construction. The cost of construction is about $200 per truss, the span is five meters and total area is about 40 sq. meter. Its a combination of earth (compressed earth blocks) and bamboo. The amount of cement used is is less than 10 percent.

Here is the latest of our creation from Janakpur. Its part of a bigger structure which will be complete in only a few more weeks.  This is our first truss that is so huge. It uses combination of cement and steel for connection.

There is so much indigenous construction knowledge out there with the people, which unfortunately is not documented or even explored by the academic or the professional world. We just “discovered” a very interesting bamboo connection and structural technique, practiced by the newars of Kathmandu. Please take a look at the pictures. These lightweight structures are used to rotate heavy structures during the famous ritual of handigaun ko jatra. If we can properly study these structure, we think, they can be appropriated in modern designs. At an initial observation, it looks like these structures can be adapted to make structures likes domes, bridges, roofs etc..

One of the main reasons for disuse of bamboo in modern construction is due to a lack of skilled human resources. For better or worse bamboo can not be standardized. Bamboo comes in different shapes and sizes which makes it a very difficult material to work with. Bamboos are very hard to produce in an industrial scale. But we take that as a blessing. Sustainability, we believe, also means scale. It is very difficult to make things sustainable and yet cater to a highly industrialized and consumerist lifestyle. Anyways, to work with bamboo requires lots of patience, creativity, improvisation and obviously skills. One has to treat every bamboo as an individual, as they look and behave differently. With a little bit of encouragement, bamboo can challenge any material. With our primitive tools, we are here fabricating bamboo trusses (10 meters), that are strong, durable and perhaps more elegant than  steel.

The work in Janakpur had stalled for various political reasons, one being kidnapping of our overseer. Well! That all seem pretty normal these days. Anyways, the villagers put all their effort to resume the work. It just heartbreaking to see, how much love and effort people have put into this project. We not only see work in Harsar as our seminal work because we have an opportunity to try out different construction methodologies like rammed earth, stablized earth blocks, adobe and cob but the social aspect of working with the community has just priceless.

This is a section of a wall with a high stone plinth and foundation, two layers of burnt bricks, adobe wall for thermal mass vertical and horizonatal bamboo reinforcement against earthquake which are all topped off with cob wall for a better adobe and bamboo connection.