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https://reasonstobecheerful.world/bamboo-building-construction-hong-kong/>
"About four stories up a gleaming tower block in downtown Hong Kong, a
shirtless figure clambers horizontally across the building’s facade, fastens a
knot and then leaps down a level like a real-life Spider-Man.
But rather than relying on hyper-elastic webs to transport himself, the young
man has his own kind of miracle material: bamboo. Vast lattices of it cover the
building and countless others across the bustling Asian metropolis.
“I think that bamboo may be the future,” says Wallace Chang, a professor in the
University of Hong Kong’s Department of Architecture. “From a material point of
view, bamboo is very sustainable. It’s relatively cheap. It’s a phenomenon.”
Throughout Chinese history, bamboo has been widely used in construction as well
as everything from basket weaving to concocting sugary juice, according to
Chang, who wrote Bamboo Theatre, a book tracing the culture of Hong Kong’s
bamboo opera, including the spectator stands made of bamboo and the masters
producing them.
In Hong Kong, the material is closely intertwined with the craft and
apprenticeships of scaffolding and construction, and it’s common to see
50-story skyscrapers like the Bank of China wrapped in it. Skilled armies of
scaffolders — today the city has 2,479 registered experts — can erect enough
bamboo to cover a building in a day, using techniques that are thousands of
years old. “In mainland China, Taiwan and Macau, bamboo is diminishing, and it
is being replaced,” says Chang. “But in Hong Kong, it’s been passed from
generation to generation by masters.”
The ubiquitous bamboo scaffolding of Hong Kong showcases the material’s
strengths — and how, like reconstituted wood, it could also be adapted to build
high rises themselves. Bamboo is flexible, strong and cheaper than steel or
aluminum. It is one of the fastest-growing plants in the world — while
traditional hardwood lumber can take 70 years to reach maturity, bamboo can be
harvested in a few years, growing in some cases 60 centimeters a day.
“It has the potential to be the most affordable structural material on the
planet,” says David Sands, founder of Rizome, a company engineering bamboo
products. “And the potential it has to cut our emissions is absolutely
enormous.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
