Introducing Bamboo in the Education of the Building Engineer

Abstract

If we believe there is a crisis regarding global warming, pollution, and social injustice, and if we want to act on it, we need to open our minds, change our attitudes, and start preparing with our young students. Together we need to develop a way of thinking that implies the use of a new set of values that differs from today’s mind-set and values that caused this crisis in the first place.With this in mind we proposed a group of students and professors to consider building structures with an alternative material: bamboo, a material with which neither students nor professors had any experience in. During the course of this exercise the conceived structures developed from simple to complex designs, from required forms to free ones designed by the students, from small 1:100 scaled models to bigger 1:20 ones.Not theory but the practice itself generated a tremendous amount of enthusiasm within the group of students and within the group of professors. Knowledge of the stability of skeletal structures was gained in a playful way; theoretical thinking-errors were immediately tested by the practical execution of the newly developed model. The existence of alternative construction materials, in this case bamboo, the feel for the material and its numerous possibilities for construction purposes were being revealed! For the involved students and professors the practical aspects of this exercise created more awareness and knowledge on the topic than any theoretical lecture could.