Ask a Colombian engineer, a Vietnamese carpenter and a Balinese designer what "building in bamboo" means and you'll get three almost incompatible answers. For the first, bamboo is a flexible frame that dissipates seismic energy within a mixed system with mud and wattle. For the second, it's a scaffolding and suspension-bridge material, worked with lashed joints that will never use a single bolt. For the third, since 2006, it's become a showcase facade material, curved, lacquered, photographed. None of the three traditions is "more authentic" than the others: they're answers to three different environmental and cultural conditions, sharing only the plant itself.
Colombian bahareque: bamboo as a seismic-resistant frame
Bahareque (a local variant of Andean quincha, also common in Peru and Ecuador) is a mixed construction system: a frame of Guadua angustifolia canes — the same species Simón Vélez uses for exposed structures — filled and clad with a mix of earth, mud and sometimes lime, applied by hand onto the wattle. Historical sources trace it back to before the Inca and Aztec empires, but it's an earthquake that turns it into a codified construction system: after a mid-18th-century earthquake in the Andean region, quincha spreads as an explicit alternative to tapia (rammed-earth masonry), which had proven fragile and lethal.
The more refined variant, known as estilo temblorero ("trembling style"), explicitly separates the behaviour of each storey: a stiffer lower level absorbs part of the seismic energy, a more flexible upper level dissipates it through deformation of the wattle and finishing mix. It's a modern seismic-design principle — storey-differentiated stiffness, controlled dissipation — put into practice through empirical technique a century before structural dynamics formalized it. After the 1999 Quindío earthquake, bahareque and Guadua houses showed much lower collapse rates than non-compliant reinforced-concrete masonry in the same region, and it's precisely this finding that triggers Colombia's effort to formally regulate bamboo construction (see the in-depth piece on structural bamboo regulation).
Vietnam: suspension bridges and scaffolding without a single nail
In the Mekong Delta and along the waterways of northern Vietnam, bamboo is traditionally the material of lightweight infrastructure: suspended footbridges, pile dwellings, and construction scaffolding still extremely common today in Vietnamese cities for building multi-storey reinforced-concrete buildings — a paradox only in appearance, because scaffolding bamboo has a weight-to-strength ratio and assembly speed that steel tube doesn't match for medium-height temporary structures. Traditional Vietnamese joints use no hardware: lashings of rattan fibre or plant rope, sometimes reinforced with bamboo pegs, transfer loads by friction and geometric interlock, not mechanical clamping.
This quiet construction culture — never monumental, always infrastructural — is the ground on which, over the past twenty years, signature projects have grafted a contemporary reinterpretation of Vietnamese bamboo, pushing the logic of geodesic vaults and double-curvature lattice structures to their extreme to cover medium-span public spaces. The difference from Colombian bahareque is clear: here bamboo is never combined with earth or mud as a mixed load-bearing material — it remains a purely woody material, worked dry.
Bali: from the rice hut to a material of authorship
Traditional Balinese practice uses bamboo mainly for secondary elements — fencing, roofing, light agricultural structures — not for the main dwelling, typically built in brick or volcanic-stone masonry. This makes what happened from 2006 onward all the more significant: John and Cynthia Hardy found the Green School in Bali, a school campus built entirely of exposed structural bamboo, and in 2010 their daughter Elora Hardy founds the studio IBUKU to carry that language forward and scale it. Since then IBUKU has built over ninety bamboo structures across Southeast Asia and Africa, including dozens of buildings on the campus itself — among them, in 2021, the Arc, a large-span double-curvature roof.
The technical leap over local tradition is the systematic treatment of culms with a borax and boric acid solution — low in toxicity, which makes bamboo's sugars indigestible to wood-boring insects without the heavy biocides often used on construction timber. The culms are drilled through at the internal nodes to let the solution penetrate the whole stem, then immersed for around two weeks or treated in a boiling chamber for 24 hours. It's a treatment derived from already-known impregnation techniques (the pressure-driven Boucherie method, developed in the 19th century for timber), adapted to bamboo's hollow, nodal geometry — the difference between a pavilion that lasts five years and one that lasts thirty.
What unites the three traditions, beyond their technical differences, is that none of the three springs from an aesthetic whim: bahareque responds to a documented seismic risk, the Vietnamese tradition to real site-economics (bamboo scaffolding costs and weighs a fraction of steel), Bali to an explicit pedagogical and ecological project that later found a global architectural market. Understanding this functional origin helps avoid the opposite, speculative error — treating bamboo as decorative exoticism, detached from the structural logic that made it, in each context, the most rational choice available.