Exhibitor’s Stories

When a treasure is valued not for its rarity, but its abundance

In the Baoxi area of China’s Zhejiang province, bamboo is abundant. It all gave architects at Studio Cardenas Conscious Design of Italy a practical idea to harness bamboo as a sustainable and low-cost material to build an energy efficient house that is designed to minimize its carbon emissions in every aspect of its life cycle. Dubbed the Energy Efficient Bamboo House, solar and geothermal power are generated to power the house, cool down the interior, heat up the water, and locally-sourced bamboo poles serve as an alternative to timber or concrete as the building’s main structural element. This test case explores the limits of what socially and environmentally conscious architecture can do in the future.