Steel or stone? Bamboo or brick? Concrete or composites? A wiser choice of construction materials could go a long way to transforming our cities into “greener” urban jungles.
An environmentally friendly building is not only about choice of site and the play of the layout. The actual materials that are laid down for the foundations, frames, walls, roof and cladding determine how green a building really is.
To date, our vocabulary on building materials has been limited to bricks, cement, timber and glass with steel occasionally popping up when needed.
But experts agree that so much more can be done to make the already widely used materials greener or to maximize the potential of currently underused ones.
Bamboo is among the latter. The pipe-like plant that can grow and be harvested faster than conventional wood is earning the label of 21th-century building material.
“In just four or five years, bamboo stems are old enough to serve as solid framing. And every year afterwards it can still be harvested,” said Eko Prawoto, a leading architect who since 2000 has tested various types of bamboo construction.
“In a way, bamboo is more renewable than timber.”
While architects in Japan and Germany have started to explore the potential of the plant for the construction industry, not many in Indonesia are willing to take the same path that Eko trod.
“Bamboo has been utilized here for centuries and it has a social aspect, quite apart from the fact that it is a potential green building material,” he said. “Its elasticity makes it suitable for buildings in earthquake-prone areas like Indonesia and it’s a labor-intensive material.”
Because of its hollow cylindrical-shaped segments, bamboo is lighter than steel but can almost match its traction coefficient. It is also stronger than concrete.
Yet despite Indonesia’s abundance of the natural material, bamboo is still viewed as being a building material for the poor. Mention building with bamboo, and the image that most likely first comes to mind is of a makeshift shack in a rural village.
Indonesia is home to some 60 species of bamboo, on a total of around 320 hectares of plantation with an annual production of 726,000 tons, according to Forestry Ministry data.
Most bamboo production and trade is conducted by small and medium enterprises, ranging from traditional bamboo wall weavers to small workshops developing more modern bamboo product manufacturing processes.
Yogyakarta’s Gadjah Mada University researcher Morisco has developed more solid bamboo jointing by combining the woody stalks with steel plates and bolts and filling the hollow segments at the joints with cement.
The result is a roof frame that is cheaper than that made of conventional wood, less prone to termites as the bamboo is pre-treated and can hold up even in the event of earthquakes.
Morisco’s laboratory has also come up with laminated bamboo where the stalks are cut and flattened into planks similar to wooden ones. These “planks” can then be further processed into wall
cladding, doors, window sills and furniture.
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