In the last week of September, Amsterdam-based art institute Mediamatic organized a two-day event in order to explore the opportunities for using bamboo as building material. Around a wooden bicycle track, designed by DUS Architects, a massive bamboo-constructed city arised. In this very short interview, the people of DUS explain about the relevance of bamboo in architecture.

What makes bamboo such an interesting buiding material?
“Obviously, bamboo is a very interesting building material – green, lightweight and strong. It allows you to build large structures really fast, in a very easy manner. All one needs are bamboo stems and in this case, simple postal elastic bands- a technique carefully developed and engineered by collaborating artist Antoon Versteegde. (In the 70ies, Versteegde was unhappy with the elitist atmosphere inside the galleries that were exposing his paintings, and he searched for another way to show his work to a broader audience, truly located outdoors in the public domain. This led him to develop temporal bamboo structures, as an outdoor display for his paintings. While working on these bamboo structures in the open, he quickly came to realise that the bamboo structures themselves, and the spontaneous bamboo-constructing with random passer-bys on the street, were more interesting than his paintings! This led him to gradually develop the postal elastic band construction technique- anyone can do it.) One learns really fast how to make a strong construction that stays put. And one doesn’t need a permit either- as the construction can be taken down in a few minutes, without leaving a trace. Building with bamboo in this manner, allows one to design while doing. It’s architectural beta testing: and therefore particularly interesting to (d)us.”

Could you tell us more about the Bamboo Building Bash?
“The Bamboo Bash coincided with PICNIC’10 (new technology/media festival) that was themed ‘re-design the world’. We took this theme literal and invited people to come build a bamboo city. We’re fascinated by people taking up own initiative, and we’re highly intrigued in that sense by the democratic powers of digital / social media, but feel that these should always be linked to physical spaces for people to gather and act. So we offered all those individuals that were collectively twittering away at PICNIC, a Bamboo Bash with some real-time analogue action! It was telling to see that while building together, people construct much more than just a bamboo structure. On a more architectural level, the Bash relates for instance to our current role as supervisors of the ‘bottom up masterplan’ in Almere Haven de Wierden, where we’re implementing and testing rule-based d.i.y. urban transformation. In the case of the Bamboo Bash, we wanted to test the possibility to create one social superstructure with help of only one rule: this being that the bamboo should somehow be connected to the ‘bike-highway’ (a wooden ramp which we recycled from our Mediamatic fixed-gear exhibition interior.) The result: Bamboo madness. And a lot of fun!”