Bamboo: A Chief Building Construction Material for Ages

This research is about the natural material bamboo in the industrial context. As a beautiful plant, bamboo has developed a survival strategy in nature with its efficient structure through million years of evolution. It has been used by man as a useful material worldwide since the beginning of human civilizations. In many countries bamboo has played an important role not only in everyday life culture but also in art, literature and philosophy due to its elegant shape, practical utilizations and symbolic meanings.

But in the industrial context this excellent natural material could not be utilized as in history because its irregular form, inhomogeneous structure and variation of the material properties are difficult to be processed by standardized machines and to be assembled with standardized industrial components. Because of its traditionally manual processing bamboo is regarded as imprecise, raw, undeveloped and as a “material for poor”.

The industrialization of the material bamboo was supposed to solve the problem of utilizing bamboo in the industrial context, which has been considered an important strategy for local economic development in many developing countries where bamboo sources are abundant. Through industrialization bamboo is processed and fabricated into different standard industrial products which are mainly used as a cheap substitute for hardwood because bamboo grows much faster than timber and is a renewable source after 4-5 years. But in this process of industrialization bamboo loses its structural advantages and at the same time also loses the connection to its traditional bamboo culture.