Webinar: Making Bamboo Mainstream
In their interactive presentation Making Bamboo Mainstream, the bamboo experts from BASE in Manila, Philippines, have shared their knowledge about bamboo as a green and disaster-resilient construction material.
“Making Construction Better – for families living in informal settlements and slums in countries of the global south. This is the Hilti Foundation’s mission in its program area “Affordable Housing and Technology”, Johann Baar, Director Affordable Housing & Technology, introduced their presentation:
Bamboo Construction is a priority: With its research and testing center, the Bamboo Academy and its own construction projects in the Philippines, Nepal and other Asian countries, the BASE Bahay Foundation, founded by the Hilti Foundation in 2014, aims to make bamboo a standard building material of the future – dedicated to the needs in construction of low-income families.
The advantage: Bamboo grows in abundant amounts in all of these countries; it captures more carbon than our native trees in Europe; it is strong and flexible at the same time and, thus, perfectly suitable for construction; and it is affordable for almost everyone who wants to build a house.
The disadvantage: So far, mostly low-income families have been using bamboo for informal construction activities, building shacks that collapse when hit by rain or wind. This has caused a bad reputation of bamboo as the poor man’s timber.
Creating a bamboo industry
Bamboo treatment facility in the Philippines.
Since its inception, the BASE Bahay Foundation has been committed to developing independent bamboo treatment centers that supply high-quality engineered bamboo to its construction sites. Today, that commitment has shifted to creating a full-scale bamboo construction industry in the country, further enabling the local economy. Independent entrepreneurs are supplying the housing market with treated bamboo, housing made from engineered bamboo such as doors, window frames or furniture, and even full-house solutions for low-income families with small but steady incomes.
Building with bamboo
Construction site in the Philippines.
For over 5,000 years, bamboo has been used as a cheap and easy to access construction material in many countries of the Global South. However, pure bamboo structures are not durable enough to withstand the frequent disasters in the region, such as typhoons and earthquakes. However, the Hilti Foundation's green and disaster resilient Cement Bamboo Frame Technology (CBFT) has transformed bamboo from a low-tech raw material into a high-tech building resource for safe and sustainable construction.
Research on bamboo
In 2021, the foundation opened its BASE Innovation Center, a fully equipped testing facility that serves as a research and training center for bamboo construction. It enables public, private and third-sector partners to leverage technology for low-cost construction at an industrial scale. The Base Innovation Center collaborates with more than 25 leading international and local universities, including ETH Zurich, Coventry University, the University of the Philippines and Virginia Tech, as well as corporate research partners like Hilti, Arup or Holcim.