BAMBOO LAB
DESIGN APPROACH
The Bamboo Lab is a crafts-based laboratory exploring the full life cycle of bamboo,
making sculptural architecture through intuitive processes and co-creative design.
GESTURE
Our designs begin in deep conversation with the context, through physical and sensual vision quests. What emerges is a sense of space which can be felt as a bodily expression of how we wish to inhabit the building-to-be. Through a series of iterative processes, the gesture becomes clearer. In the way that initial impressions of the gesture carry the spirit of the creation, often an initial sketch or a rough model will inform final details.
OPEN ARCHITECTURE
Living in a tree tent for the first phase of the Bamboo Lab exploration was a huge liberation and invitation to reimagine how we inhabit space. Being an architectural exploration in a tropical climate, this has become a language of building deeply in connection with the surrounding landscape - where the nature, the forest becomes the 'walls'. The concepts of 'inside' and 'outside' are blended as the threshold between them softens. When we inhabit buildings in this way we deepen our remembrance that we are part of nature.
CONSTRUCTION as DESIGN EXPLORATION
Each construction project at Ekawa is an exploration into new design and structural possibilities, connecting with the wide potential of the materiality of bamboo. Many structural solutions have emerged through creative processes of investigation and a refinement of our structural intuition, which has happened through a devotion to being part of many construction processes.
DEEP COLLABORATION
The Lab is a space for insight to arise through the act of creation. Design is explored through dialogue, quiet observation and model-making before construction begins, but does not end there.
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Deep collaboration is at the heart of the construction process. The design always evolves on site as the gesture begins to merge with the structural and aesthetic possibilities of bamboo and contextual opportunities.
LOCAL CRAFT meets SCULPTURAL DESIGN
The lab comprises...
* a design team, who conceives all sculptural spaces, envisions the rhythms of the projects and coordinates the overall dynamics of the Lab;
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* a creative local crafts-team, that brings ancestral wisdom as well as a powerful impulse to make things happen;
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...and at times also includes like-minded participants, who immerse themselves in hands-on learning and wild lifestyle experiences during a workshop experience, a 'Generation' of the Bamboo Lab (see archive of workshops). Future workshops will be announced on this webpage and on our instragram (@ekawa_bamboolab).