The Bamboo Pavilion Building Trust have hosted an International Bamboo Festival located in Phnom Penh, Cambodia featuring a landmark bamboo pavilion, the winning design from an international design competition.
A group of Architects from Florence, Italy were recently announced as the winning team in the design competition that hopes to shape the future of building with bamboo globally. The competition had over 125 entries and a jury including representatives from Building Trust International, local skilled bamboo workers and professionals from the fields of architecture and landscape design.
The design competition sought to find an innovative design proposal for a landmark pavilion structure made from bamboo. The bamboo piece was constructed at the centre of a Bamboo Festival, ‘CAMBOO’ which Building Trust hosted in Phnom Penh, Cambodia this Spring. The winning design was announced as ‘Hyperbamboo’. The project team comprises of Roberto Bologna, Fernando Barth, Chiara Moretti and Denny Pagliai.
The team combined the traditional material of bamboo with an innovative construction system, taking inspiration from Cambodian architecture.
The jury selected the design as the competition winner due to its intelligent and well thought out use of bamboo as a construction material. The team took advantage of bamboo’s tensile strength and flexible characteristics.
The jury were also very impressed with level of clear understanding and thought paid to the building stages of the design.
The Winning team said, “The design has been very challenging and we have worked very hard to meet the competition requirements. We also are very proud to contribute to the mission of Building Trust international and strengthen the role of design: people need architecture but architecture needs people as well”.
Contestants were asked to consider the versatility of bamboo as a building material, how design and construction of the proposal could stimulate the local economy, use of the pavilion during the CAMBOO Festival and overall aesthetics. A wide range of competition entries made creative and imaginative use of how to construct with bamboo and highlighted the need for the construction industry to increase awareness of using sustainable materials such as bamboo.
CAMBOO was held to encourage the wider appreciation of bamboo and its use in construction. The goal is to generate progressive contemporary design ideas that Building Trust international and partners can actively work towards. Featured at CAMBOO Festival were six of the top Architecture and Engineering Universities from Phnom Penh who collaborated with Building
Trust to design and build bamboo pavilions for the Festival. The Winning University pavilion was ‘Seashell and a Heart’ by Institute of Technology of Cambodia.
David Cole founding partner of Building Trust international said, “CAMBOO was a huge success, the winning project had an incredible level of thought and detail into the overall construction and buildability of the design. The Hyperbamboo design played a key role in the success of the CAMBOO
Festival and was a focal and integral point of the event creating a central hub and base.”
The aim of CAMBOO is to capture the minds of the public and help to overcome the widespread stigma that bamboo is a poor material and firmly set Cambodia as a place where modern architecture and traditional building materials can combine.
Nick Myall
New editor
