Artisanship, Beautiful Homes, Issue 112

The Magic of IBUKU’s Bamboo Buildings

Traditional Balinese craft meets Western engineering in an extraordinary building style

Writer James Dolan
Photographer Tommaso Riva

“When properly treated, bamboo structures can last a lifetime or longer.”
—Elora Hardy, IBUKU founder

Some species of bamboo can climb four centimetres within a single hour, making bamboo the fastest-growing plant on earth. Bamboo is also one of the strongest plants, with tensile strength (the maximum load it can support without fracturing) of 28,000 pounds per square inch, making it over 20% stronger than steel.

To Canadian-born architect and designer Elora Hardy, such facts were more than trivia. They were the start of a career-long fascination with bamboo.

Arc-IBUKU-7- — The Arc’s whimsical shape combines traditional Balinese design vocabulary with a modern geometric form.

Founder and creative founder of IBUKU, a pioneering architectural and design firm based in Bali, Indonesia, Hardy has been studying and developing new ways to use this extraordinary plant to build unique structures that balance form with function.

“When properly treated, bamboo structures can last a lifetime or longer,” Hardy says.

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