BAMBOO BUILDING
Design Studio V - Spring 2023 | As a class, collectively choose one building material (bamboo) to study throughout the entire duration of the semester and build a pavilion made out of the chosen material. Individually, design a building where it is the primary material used in construction.
Leading into our construction phase of this Design + Build project, everyone was tasked with submitting their own proposals for the final pavilion’s design that suggested various ways to utilize bamboo as a building material. Below are two iterations of a bamboo design I came up with and presented to my class.
BAMBOO BENCH PAVILION
After viewing each others competition boards, my Studio V class voted on bamboo as our chosen material for the semester, as well as a pavilion design by one of my classmates, Sinh. As a class, we spent several weeks refining this design until our building materials arrived. Once construction began, our class split up into various teams to divide the workload as we only had a few weeks left to finish the bench. My biggest contribution to this project was a website I made full of additional process/bamboo information and media. This became an interactive element to our pavilion where users could scan the QR codes attached to our bench in order to view the website as they sat on it. Click the button below to check out the website for yourself!
The final task of the semester was designing our own 8-story “farm/factory building” that had bamboo as its primary building material. Essentially, we were supposed to design a multi-story building that served as an architectural office/firm, a live bamboo farm, and a manufacturing/construction factory. This also included coming up with a unique “flex program” that transformed our building into a public attraction. It had to be located somewhere in Colorado, so I chose a lush site in Boulder near a large reservoir. Because bamboo has such Asian roots, I wanted to remain true to its cultural significance. I decided to design a unique Chinatown market near a big body of water that also had the potential to act as an event or festival space. This space hoped to temporarily transport Asian Americans home while also sharing their rich culture to another.
