Simón Vélez and Bamboo Architecture (German/English)

Bamboo, which has been used as building material for centuries and is widely available (35 million acres worldwide are covered in bamboo), is being rediscovered today. Its cost-effectiveness and ability to endure adverse environmental forces make it one of the preeminent construction materials on the planet. Bamboo's unique aesthetic appearance has been exploited in design and furniture building.

The highly visual and engaging Grow Your Own House will open your eyes to the beauty and lightness of bamboo structures and designs. Bamboo—a widely available and renewable resource almost as strong as steel, yet very light—lends itself to architectural experiments. Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Renzo Piano, Shoei Yoh, and Arata Isozaki are a few of the millions of people worldwide using bamboo to create space and structure around them.

Author and architect Simón Vélez pioneered bamboo construction in his home country of Colombia. His most recent and spectacular project, which is prominently featured in Grow Your Own House, is the Expo 2000 pavilion for the ZERI Foundation. At over 120 feet in diameter and over 50 feet high, it is one of the largest bamboo structures in the world.

Grow Your Own House includes all the latest trends of this cutting-edge revival. The integration of the seeming dichotomies of high-tech and sustainability, global thinking and regional traditions definitely makes the future look brighter. This lavishly and colorfully illustrated volume is published in dual languages (German and English).

Contributors to this volume include Jean Dethier, Walter Liese, Eda Schaur, Frei Otto, and Mateo Kries.

This is, by far, the most unusual book we've reviewed in a long time... Grow Your Own House is a spectacular and appealing invitation to construction with bamboo. Simón Vélez has designed a bamboo structure more than 120 feet in diameter and 50 feet high; the first third of the book examines Vélez's work in Colombia and elsewhere. Next are sections on "basic elements" of bamboo construction, showing examples of walls, windows and doors, connecting joints, roofs, floors, and foundations. The last part of the book has sections on bamboo botany, cutting and processing bamboo, low-cost bamboo buildings, bamboo domes, testing bamboo, composite materials, and more. There is also a valuable bibliography on bamboo biology and utilization.

Perhaps you are thinking that the idea of growing a structure seems far-fetched. If you examine this book in a serious way, we guarantee that the idea will seem, well, quite natural. Gardens that yield buildings—why not?

To learn more, please visit the webpage of the VITRA Design Museum.