As well as being cheap, bamboo appears to have remarkable qualities of seismic resistance. These houses have been built with it to protect p
Bamboo has been used as a building material for millennia in South America, Africa and Asia, and grows in abundance in many countries in these regions. But only recently has its seismic resilience started to be more widely recognised through a growing body of research and laboratory shock tests, which indicate that its remarkable natural properties could make it ideal for withstanding earthquakes. Today, construction projects across the world, from the Philippines to Pakistan to Ecuador, are seeking to utilise the natural material that engineers and architects compare favourably to steel.
Bamboo forests are incredibly fast growing and act as carbon sinks, absorbing more carbon than they release, so building with bamboo rather than materials like concrete and steel can drastically reduce a structure's embodied carbon. It is also cheap and locally available in many countries.
"That's part of the selling point of bamboo, the benefits in terms of regenerative forestry, but also the ideas of sustainability in terms of economic and social equity," Sharma says.
