Hello!
Today we will talk about a very interesting plant - bamboo.
Historically, people have been using bamboo for a very long time.
The history of plant farming goes back several millennia.
Already in the 16th-11th centuries BC, bamboo was widely used by people in China.
These were food, and clothing, and housing, and means of transportation, and musical instruments,
and weapons.
The first recorded paper was made from the inner pulp of bamboo in the 2nd century BC.
in China.
Due to its unique properties, bamboo has long been considered a symbol of success and health.
In Chinese culture, bamboo is considered a symbol of culture and righteousness, and in
Indian culture, it is considered a symbol of friendship.
It is an extremely important material for many people in their daily activities.
This is housing, and fences, and animal cages, and tools, and much more.
Bamboo plays a key role in agricultural activities.
It serves as a support in the cultivation of tomatoes and peppers.
It is used to make supporting posts for passion fruit, banana and cocoa trees.
Wherever there is still a handicraft and affordable construction from bamboo, there is increasing
pressure from society for one reason or another to replace bamboo with steel or wood, and
build housing from concrete or brick.
Strictly speaking, bamboo is not a modern material, it is a natural material.
Its use has a long history.
In fact, this material is simply amazing.
It makes it possible to make things from it that cannot be made from other materials.
Anything can be made from bamboo.
According to the Philippine creation myth, when the bamboo tree grew, a man and a woman
emerged from its hollow and branches.
The man's name was Sikalak, and the woman's name was Sikabay.
They were the progenitors of mankind.
Bamboo is a herb with more than one thousand two hundred and fifty known species, found
in a wide variety of biotopes, from cold mountains to hot tropical regions.
Bamboo can be of different sizes.
Some of them are very small, only a few centimeters high, while others are huge, reaching over
thirty meters in height.
In the Guinness Book of Records, bamboo is named the fastest growing plant on the planet.
It grows at a growth rate of 90 cm per day, which is an impressive rate of almost 5 cm
per hour.
The bamboo you see now was planted about two and a half years ago.
Now its height is about 15 meters, and when it finally grows, the height will be from
25 to 30 meters.
Bamboo is a unique building material.
When used correctly, bamboo is equal in tensile strength to steel, and equal in compressive
strength to brick and concrete.
So why is bamboo needed at all today, except perhaps to preserve traditional designs and
production methods?
After all, we already have a large selection of modern and well-proven materials, such
as concrete, steel, wood, brick and various plastics, which fully satisfy the needs of
modern society.
The potential of bamboo is huge.
It lies in its wide range of applications.
There are more than 1500 areas of its use.
This is the recent development of bamboo paper, textiles and, most importantly for designers
and architects, obtaining suitable building materials from bamboo.
It is well suited for both interior work - creating floors, walls, ceilings and furniture, and
for the exterior - decking, cladding, outdoor furniture and joinery.
During a storm, bamboo bends but does not break.
Today, using fossil fuels as a source of energy, we extract solid carbon from the earth and
release it into the atmosphere in a gaseous state.
One successful strategy to reduce the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is what
is called "biological carbon sequestration".
This is the process of carbon storage in plants, dead organic matter and soil.
Because biological sequestration takes CO2 from the atmosphere and stores it in carbon
pools, it is also referred to as a carbon "sink".
Biological carbon sequestration is the process by which plants and microorganisms store solid
carbon in plant biomass and soils.
Plants use carbon as building blocks, and they take it from the atmosphere.
Trees and plants are natural carbon sinks, accumulating and storing carbon.
Thus, bamboo's rapid growth makes it a very useful resource for quickly capturing and
sequestering atmospheric carbon.
Tree planting can help mitigate some of the environmental degradation associated with
rapid urbanization.
The ability to grow quickly and continuously produce new leaves makes bamboo an attractive
choice for this purpose.
The structure of the bamboo rhizome, as well as the root under the soil, is incredibly
complex.
This has a beneficial effect on fixing soils, stopping erosion and silting up rivers, as
well as regulating water flow.
Bamboo also has an excellent ability to purify water.
The physical composition of bamboo allows it to remove and accumulate organic waste.
Man-made bamboo plantations can reverse soil degradation when overused.
At the same time, abandoned territories are being restored.
The restored landscapes bring many new social, environmental and economic benefits.
In just two years, new bamboo plantations can restore 70% of soil erosion.
For example, bamboo can even grow in human urine.
Bamboo has proven its effectiveness in the process of soil phytoremediation, which is
a set of methods for cleaning wastewater, soil and atmospheric air from hazardous chemicals
using green plants.
Bamboo can often grow in problematic soils that many other crops cannot grow in.
Bamboo can turn waste into a sustainable resource.
It has a future, and over time, architects and engineers will have to rethink the use
of building materials in general to find new ways to use sustainable and renewable resources.
Two and a half billion people in the world, mostly in third world countries, use bamboo
every day for food, housing, construction, furniture, kitchen utensils, animal husbandry,
hunting tools and other purposes.
Recently, one can observe an increase in the use of bamboo products in modern life.
Today, bamboo is used in many areas, from design, food and energy to sports, cosmetics
and medicine.
Anything that can be made from wood can also be made from bamboo.
Bamboo fabric has become very popular.
Visually, the material is similar to cotton, but surpasses it in a number of indicators.
To make it, the woody shell is removed from the stem of the plant.
Only the soft part of the cereal is processed.
Raw materials are treated with caustic soda (caustic soda).
Then the whole mass is passed through a special mesh, which allows you to get a homogeneous
substance.
Threads are formed from the frozen substance, and matter is woven from them on the machines.
Bamboo fabric is used to make almost all types of clothing.
It is this fact that is the reason why representatives of fashion houses and sewing studios buy this
knitwear in bulk.
Bamboo can be processed into biofuel, which is used for transportation and high-temperature
industrial processes.
Activated carbon, paper, textiles and bioplastics are obtained from it.
Bamboo bikes are high performance.
In addition, bamboo is used in the industry related to sports and recreation.
This is the production of skateboards, surfboards, snowboards, polo balls and other things.
Bamboo is used to make agricultural implements, fishing baskets and traps, water wheels and
pipes.
They also produce handles for tools, rakes and shovels, fishing nets and fishing line.
Bamboo furniture is very durable and quite popular today.
Bamboo is used to make sofa sets, tables, chairs, beds and rocking chairs.
Beautiful and high-quality bamboo floors are obtained.
And on the dining table, you can increasingly find bamboo shoots and leaves as food, tea,
wine, vinegar and beer.
In the food and beverage industry, more and more bamboo is being used to make beer and
wine.
Bamboo beer has the aroma of its leaves and has a refreshing and mild taste.
Many people consider this beer to be a healthy and high quality drink that can help lower
blood lipids.
Bamboo has many uses in the pulp and paper industry.
It is processed into printing paper, cardboard, toilet paper, coffee cups, and cement bags.
Delicate bamboo leaves are used to produce tea with beneficial properties.
In modern life, people are used to living in concrete.
If you ask them which do they prefer, a bamboo house or a concrete house?
Most will answer: “Of course, a concrete house.
It's quieter there."
This begs the question: if bamboo is such a wonderful material, then why isn't it used
more in architecture and construction?
The answer here depends on many factors, including culture, the market economy, and the structural
properties of bamboo.
As for civil engineers, they need to have a good understanding of the mechanical properties
of bamboo in order to design a successful structure from it.
Today, probably, no one will subscribe to the fact that a building made of bamboo will
be good in terms of structural integrity and durability.
But with steel, wood and concrete, this is easy to do.
This is because all structural engineering calculations for these materials are known.
This is not the case for bamboo.
The construction industry is ancient and conservative, and it is difficult for bamboo to compete
with other materials due to its small scale nature and limited budget.
People like to be in their comfort zone, which is why cement, concrete, steel and wood are
so widely used.
So why would people use bamboo?
Bamboo is not like a prefabricated material, it is a natural material.
Each of its dimensions is different from each other.
Bamboo is a special material, it is not like an ordinary pipe, each bamboo is individual.
The building codes commonly used by architects in major cities, New York, London or Tokyo,
may be restrictive for the use of bamboo.
The problem with bamboo is that it doesn't fall under strict categorization, at least
not in its natural form.
Bamboo is still considered more of an exotic material, a poor man's wood seen in beach
huts, garden structures and tiki bars, rather than as an alternative to modern buildings.
To this it should be added that the material requires a special know-how, and this know-how
is currently found mainly in third world countries.
Bamboo grows outside the big cities, in these places it is cheap or available for free,
so in the third world countries it is a very important resource for construction.
Unlike the past, these countries may become pioneers and experimenters in the field of
bamboo in the future.
Architects from developing countries are leading the industry in terms of innovation.
A good example is the skyscrapers under construction in the Netherlands called the "Towers of Grotius".
Part of the facade of the buildings is made using bamboo.
The use of bamboo is also constrained by its inability to blend well with other material
systems.
Bamboo is organic in nature, it is impossible to find the same stems.
This is precisely what makes it difficult to use bamboo in modern building practice.
People for the most part prefer to use much more modern materials, allowing combinations
with glass, steel, or something like that.
In order to use the full potential of bamboo in terms of structural properties in modern
building practice, a number of problems must be overcome, such as: treating bamboo as a
material for the poor; fluctuations in its size; material evaluation tasks; and difficulty
in obtaining conventional joinery, as bamboo has very specific material properties.
Bamboo is a tube, which means it is stronger in one direction than the other.
It's like a bottle of water, which is strong in one direction and crumbles very easily
in the other direction.
In addition to this, the structure of bamboo fibers is very linear.
The most unique property of bamboo is its ability to bend because it is
a hollow tube reinforced with diaphragms.
This basically prevents it from warping when bent.
These properties place it
in a unique range of materials along with carbon
fiber reinforced plastics or maybe part aluminum.
The use of bamboo in the construction of a bicycle frame shows it to be a high performance
material, as it absorbs shocks naturally, providing a very smooth cycling experience.
Since bamboo fibers are aligned longitudinally, any operation where the fibers are cut will
reduce its structural capacity.
Therefore, it is quite difficult to make ordinary joinery from bamboo.
And yet, in the modern world, using digital methods and computer modeling, it is possible
in the future to use bamboo in modern construction.
Today, there are many modern innovative projects related to the aesthetic and technical properties
of bamboo in modern architectural practice.
The most interesting projects are those that try to soften the world of bamboo and contemporary
architecture.
This is an attempt to use
the unique properties of bamboo in modern buildings.
These projects focus on how bamboo can blend well with other materials such as steel, wood,
concrete and glass without losing its soul.
This creates a new design space for architects to explore.
Then everything can be made from bamboo, including balustrades, structural elements, and even
cladding.
But
it works best when combined with what are called modern materials.
That's all.
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