Grow Your Own House: Simón Vélez and Bamboo Architecture / Simón Vélez and Bamboo Architecture

The advantages of bamboo, one of the world's most important building materials, are being rediscovered today: it is considered extremely cost-effective and sustainable, has a distinctive aesthetic, and its internal structure shows astonishing parallels to high-tech materials. The architect Simón Vélez, born in Colombia in 1959, recognized the advantages of this material and implemented it in a variety of buildings. His most recent work, the ZERI Foundation pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hanover - one of the largest bamboo structures in the world with a diameter of 40 meters and a height of 17 meters - is presented in detail. Architects such as Buckminster Fuller, Frei Otto, Renzo Piano, Shoei Yoh and Arata Isozaki have also experimented with bamboo. Charlotte Perriand created fascinating furniture from it, and the Japanese architect Hiroshi Teshigahara showcases the aesthetic versatility of bamboo with his impressive stage sets. These trends and many other examples of sophisticated bamboo architecture make "Grow your own House" the first work to appreciate the architectural significance of bamboo at a high design level. It shows that bamboo is a material with a great future, because it combines what was previously often considered incompatible: high tech and sustainability, global thinking and regional traditions. "Grow your own House" was created in close collaboration with the "Zero Emissions Research Initiative", ZERI Foundation, Geneva, and CIRECA (Centre International de Recherche et d'Education Culturelle et Agricole), Lessac. With contributions from Jean Dethier, Walter Liese, Eda Schaur, Frei Otto, Mateo Kries.