Few pairs of authors in the same discipline represent two opposite extremes as much as Simón Vélez and IBUKU. Both work almost exclusively in structural bamboo. Both have built their international reputation on this material, considered marginal by Western academic architecture until just a few decades ago. But their relationship with form, with joinery, with the very idea of what "structural honesty" means, couldn't be more different.
Simón Vélez: engineering as discipline, not as constraint
Vélez, a Colombian architect with no formal academic engineering training, built his own language around an almost stubborn idea: Guadua bamboo should be used in compression and bending exactly as one would use steel or reinforced concrete, with a construction detail capable of solving the material's most critical structural problem — the joint. His solution, extremely widespread today, involves drilling through the culm's internal nodes at the joint point and injecting cement grout: the hardened grout forms a rigid internal plug that lets threaded rods pass through the culm without crushing its thin outer fibres, which would otherwise be vulnerable to local crushing under a conventional bolt's clamping force.
The formal result is consistent with the method: radial trusses, fanned roofs, large cantilevers — all visible, all legible as a force diagram, with no cladding hiding the logic. The ZERI Pavilion in Hannover (Expo 2000) remains the manifesto work: a forty-metre roof span, assembled and dismantled in a few weeks, without a single steel beam in the main structure. It's an aesthetic born from technical necessity and turned into language — not the other way around. Vélez doesn't sketch the form first and then look for a way to build it in bamboo: he designs starting from what correctly jointed Guadua can do.
IBUKU: bamboo as a sculptural material
IBUKU was founded in Bali in 2010 by Elora Hardy to continue and expand the work of her parents John and Cynthia Hardy, who in 2006 had founded the Green School campus built entirely of exposed bamboo. IBUKU's approach starts from a premise almost opposite to Vélez's: bamboo shouldn't be bent to the logic of the straight beam and the visible structural node, but rather indulged in its natural tendency to curve, wrap, form spirals and organic volumes. Many of the studio's projects — the Sharma Springs villa above the Ayung river valley, six storeys tall and described as the tallest bamboo house in Indonesia, or the campus's own large spiral roofs — are designed not through traditional technical drawings but through physical scale models, built and rebuilt by hand until the geometry the material "wants" to take is found.
The difference from Vélez also lies in the scale of the detail: where Vélez exposes the grout injected into the nodes as part of the technical language, IBUKU tends to treat the joint as an artisanal-decorative detail, often with visible natural-fibre lashings, hand-smoothed surfaces, entire curved walls that recall an inhabitable sculpture more than a static diagram. Systematic boron-solution treatment of the culms — necessary for durability in the humid tropical climate — is common to both approaches, but while in Vélez's work it stays an invisible technical step, in IBUKU's it's part of a craft process told almost as much as the final form.
That there's no single "correct" way to turn bamboo into architectural language is, ultimately, the strongest proof of its maturity as a building material: a truly marginal material doesn't generate two internationally recognized, formally incompatible schools of thought. It only generates imitations of a single prototype. Vélez and IBUKU each demonstrate, in their own way, that bamboo can sustain both discipline and formal freedom — the choice between the two isn't imposed by the material, it belongs to the architect.