Customer Reviews

New Bamboo: Architecture and Design

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

During the International Bamboo Festival at Fairchild Tropical Gardens in Miami, I had the pleasure of personally meeting Marcelo Villegas. He is truly "el miestro", a master carpenter, who builds some of the most exciting and innovative bamboo buildings in the world. He is soft-spoken, humble, and refers to himself as a simple carpenter, not master.

The book is a great reference for photographs of his most recent exciting work. Bamboo is a natural building material which has some very interesting properties. It is as strong as steel by weight and has incredible strength under tension.

Villegas has a deep understanding for the special type of bamboo he used, Guadua Angustifolia, which is native to his Colombia. He treats each project organically and executes them flawlessly.

He helped build the largest bamboo structure in the world which was tested by German Engineers for the WORLD EXPO in Hannover in 2000. The structure was so strong, according to him, that is surpassed german building codes (the toughest in the world).

This is a MUST buy bamboo book, one you won't regret buying.

The book is beautiful, well documented and presents a marvellous insight about the great work of Simon Velez and his colleague Marcelo Villegas.

It is though a mystery that the book simply decides to neglect mentioning the ZERI Foundation and its protagonist Gunter Pauli who prefered to go broke over the initiative, then to drop the ball half way.

Thanks to his determination the full scientific tests on bamboo could be undertaken, the building permit could be obtained for a first time ever in an industrialzed country, and the 6.4 million visitors could admire the masterpiece created by Simon Velez.

One would have expected that an othewise professional publisher like Villegas Editores, who is well aware of the origins of the great building in Hanover would have put reality in balance. After all without this large investment this masterpiece would never have materialized.

It is hoped that the book will quickly sell out, become a great success which it deserves and then this minor error could be corrected.

This book is full of great ideas for building with bamboo, the photos are spectacular. We got it to help us with design ideas for a tree house we are building on our resort in India. It really helps me when communicating with our Indian architects to be able to point to pictures of certain techniques I found in this book.

Michael Skowronski
Author of Unforgettable: A Love and Spiritual Growth Story

The picture on the front cover says it all - this book might be useful if you are designing or making large Bamboo structures but it gives no advice about using Bamboo to make a real house to live in.

It's not a "How to" book - I can't recommend it.