The first advanced studio that I chose during my fifth year was about creating an exhibition hall using one, locally sourced and processed material. From the choices of marble, limestone, brick, steel, aluminum, glass, mass timber, and bamboo, my partner, Tori Charmoli, and I chose to design with bamboo. Bamboo can be a sustainable material because of it's fast growth and high strength to weight ratio. The site we chose to design this exhibition hall for is located in Penglipuran Village in Bali, Indonesia. Our design used Grasshopper for Rhino to produce hundreds of iterations for a tensile structure made using several sizes of bamboo which can be found in the forest that our building nestles into. We looked to the local vernacular for formal inspiration that works with the climate, and modern tensile bamboo structures for our structural systems. The final design is incorporated into an existing trail network and has gallery space below an flexible space.
